


A Mounting Shame

by hypnoticwinter



Series: Down the Rabbit Hole [2]
Category: Mystery Flesh Pit, Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Exploration, F/F, F/M, Growth, Horror, LGBTQ Themes, Mystery, Novel, Pulp, Thriller, flesh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:00:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 83,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28144998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypnoticwinter/pseuds/hypnoticwinter
Summary: In a few short days, Roan Dzilenski has come to grips with her own mortality - but when she is confronted with the yawning maw of the Permian Basin Superorganism, will she remain resolute or falter? A Mounting Shame follows Roan down into the belly of the beast, tagging along with a team of crack military commandos, on a mission to retrieve a mysterious crystal that might prove the key to making sure the Pit stays asleep a while longer, but the deeper she goes, the more she realizes that things are not as it seems. Hunted by a legendary inhuman assassin and plunged into utter darkness, Roan must learn to trust her own instincts in order to survive.
Series: Down the Rabbit Hole [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2060763
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

The next punch out whips out low and fast and I just barely twist out of the way in time. I purse my lips, glare at Elena. “You know,” I tell her, “I thought we were supposed to be boxing.”

“We are boxing,” she says, tossing her head to flick an errant curl of bleached-blonde hair out of her slate eyes, waggling one gloved fist at me.

“You don’t sucker-punch in boxing.”

“Yeah, well,” she says. I can see a shift in her movement, see her eyes flick downwards at me, and I know instinctively that she’s going to try something. I let myself roll onto the balls of my feet, let my knees bend slightly. “I’ve never been good at following the rules,” she grunts, snapping out another punch right at my gut. This time I’m ready for it.

The four years of Karate I took in college had never really served me very well, but there was one advantage I’d had that I think Elena wasn’t expecting from me – I went to a hardcore dojo, not a belt factory. Sparring three days a week, stretches and warmups intense enough that I barely was able to stumble my way through the material afterwards…but I adapted after enough time pushing myself and then it wasn’t so bad, once I was able to rely on my body’s newfound strength.

I’d hated it at the time. I don’t know why I bothered to keep up with it once I’d completed that first-year PE credit, but something kept bringing me back. Maybe it was the way one of the instructors, a tall, swarthy man named Ali, would grin at me after he’d cajoled me into dipping down a couple of inches deeper into a straddle split, or raising my leg a couple of inches higher in a kick hold, maybe it was the way that I went from not being able to break a single board even if I really tried to being able to break three with a punch and not even feel it afterwards, but something about the tangible improvement tickled some sort of progress-happy funny bone in my psyche and from then on I was hooked.

I made it halfway to a blue belt before I’d graduated and had to move away from Oklahoma. In Karate terms that’s still a little baby, really, but if Elena thinks I’ve never learned to dance she’s going to have another think coming.

I push my arm down and block the blow, deflecting it downwards. Her fist skids off the flat of my thigh and I barely feel it. Then I take a step to the side and spin, whipping out a roundhouse and halting it just next to the side of her head. To her credit she barely flinches, just flicks her eyes over and considers my foot as though it’s something mildly repulsive. The tendon in my groin down the inner base of my thigh is throbbing a little and I know I’ll regret the maneuver later but for the moment I’m alright.

“Didn’t realize you knew MMA,” she snarls, clamping onto my leg before I can react, twisting it and sending us both to the ground. I fall awkwardly and feel the sting as the hard foam mat slaps me in the palms and the chest. Then she clambers over me before I can roll back up onto my hands and knees, getting me into an impromptu sleeper choke. I know how to get out of one while I’m standing but from the ground is a different matter entirely. I squirm a little, trying to work my hands back around behind her, but she tightens her forearm around my neck and I stop.

“You gonna tap?” she purrs into my ear, sounding angry, and I have to suppress a wriggle as an electric thrill makes its scorching way down my spine, driving the heat into my cheeks as with a jackhammer. I can smell her, the scent of sweat and something vaguely hot and spicy, some sort of perfume or maybe just her natural smell, and I realize exactly how close she is, how hyper-alert I am to every touch of her lithe, muscular body, the way her breasts are pressing against my shoulderblades and I can feel her –

Jesus Christ, Roan, get a grip.

I reach out slowly ahead of me and tap the mat three times. Elena squeezes a little harder for a moment and then slowly disengages from me and rolls away. I flop onto my back and glance over at her. “You realize I’m just here to work a camera, right? You guys are going to handle all the fighting.”

“I’m not even going to tell you why that’s a fucking stupid sentiment,” she says. “What if something grabs you down there and nobody else is around to help?”

“What, I’m supposed to get it in a sleeper choke?”

“No,” she says slowly, as though I’m stupid, “you’re supposed to fight back however you can.”

“I don’t think I –“

She offers me her hand, the glove hanging loosely from the strap, and pulls me up. “Take initiative,” she suggests. “Be proactive,” she says, and then before I can react she reaches up with the other hand, still gloved, and pops me lightly in the face. It’s clearly not designed to injure, she hits about as lightly as she can, but something about the physics of it tweaks something in my nose and I feel a twinge and then a trickle of fluid down the front of my face. She stares, incredulous, at the blood on her glove and then rolls her lips back in a diamond-edged grin. She brings the glove up to her mouth and starts to stick her tongue out; I watch as if in slow motion, the seconds stretching like taffy. I feel my mouth drop open in shock; I hear my heart throbbing at the base of my ears. My hands are shaking.

When I act the time compresses back and it feels as though I’m moving a million miles an hour. I step forward and shove her backwards hard, my hand on her chest, and as she stumbles I take the glove by the wrist and pull and her hand slips from it; I was lucky she’d already loosened the strap or I’d have just yanked her back towards me.

“What the hell is your problem?” she barks at me, and I realize that everyone in the training room is staring at us, squared off again across the mat, her glove clutched in my trembling hand. I look down at it and then, not knowing what else to do, wipe the blood off on my shirt, leaving a dirty crimson stain like spilled jam on the hem.

“I thought you were going to –“ I start, but she snatches the glove from my grasp and stalks away to the showers, giving me a withering look over her shoulder.

“Fuck off,” she tells me. “Like I would _actually_ –“

Then she’s gone. I can feel my cheeks burning. I avoid a forest of stares and head off to the elliptical, but although everyone returns to their own routines I feel a burning claw of awkwardness sunk into my gut like a fishhook and eventually it makes me feel so uncomfortable that I stop partway through and walk off to the locker room as well, trying not to feel like I’m scurrying off with my tail between my legs.

As I round the corner, trailing my fingers along the inlaid tile, the faint coarse griminess gathering reassuringly at my touch, I realize that the shower isn’t running and I have a brief moment to hope that Elena’s already been and left before I turn the corner and I’m staring at her naked back, long and muscular, a curving v-taper nudging downward into the swell of her hips and a whole heap of emotions flutter around me. Before I can tear my eyes away she looks back at me and our eyes meet for just a moment and then I snap mine away and hurry over to my locker and start to change. I can feel her looking at me but I keep my face forwards, don’t meet her gaze.

“Is your nose alright?” she asks after a moment, and for an instant – just an instant – I debate pretending I haven’t heard her, but I know that’s a ridiculous idea; she’s about ten feet away from me and we’re the only two in the locker room. I put my hand up to my face quickly and then draw it back, but it looks like the nosebleed is over already and all that’s left is drying blood on my face. I take a towel and go to the sink, dab at it.

“I’m fine,” I tell her.

“I really wasn’t trying to hurt you,” she says.

Elena Novak, hot-shot ex-mil ranger, apologizing to me. What a joke.

“It’s alright,” I tell her, glancing behind me. She hasn’t put a shirt on yet and my eyes drag downwards as though drawn by gravity and then I whip them back up again. I think I see a tiny ghost of a smile quirking the corner of her mouth before it vanishes. “What were you trying to do, anyway?” I ask her, and she shrugs.

“I don’t want you to get torn up down there,” she says. “It’s a tough environment.” I manage to get myself cleaned up but the towel’s a mess now. I shrug, toss it into my bag, and then tug my shirt off, slip into my regular clothes. I think I can feel Elena’s eyes on me but when I look back over at her she’s putting her own clothes on, seemingly minding her own business.

It’s been a busy three days. When Makado and Peter and I drove back into the base I didn’t know what to expect, I scarcely had any idea what I might be signing up for. I had a notion I’d be going into the Pit in order to document…something, but what that something might be was beyond me. From everything she and Peter had said, it seemed like the Pit was dead these days, at least as far as human activity goes. Just very minimal extraction of things like ballast fluid and bone plates, but nothing on par with what the Park used to produce.

Instead, we’d taken a left at the fork driving back in and, at Makado’s direction, the Humvee had dropped her and I off at the entrance to one of the barracks – Peter had said he’d had to pick something up from a different building - and then Makado had knocked briefly and then sauntered in, the two of us trailing along in her wake.

Inside had been about seven or eight people, all in various states of undress or relaxation; there was a dartboard on the wall, cots pressed against the sides, an attached bathroom and a general air of levity. You could smell it; it was like walking into what I imagined a field barracks somewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq might have been like, the same lazy air of general superiority, the same sense of cagey, feigned easiness that at the first sign of trouble could evaporate into a coordinated machine, each of its members greasing together like fitted gears.

Makado cleared her throat and silence fell, with a last subtle clink as someone nudged a bottle somewhere out of sight with their foot. Eight pairs of eyes swung around to meet ours, gazing with mixed curiosity and indifference. At least, I remember thinking to myself, there was no overt hostility.

“Gentlemen,” Makado had said, voice colored with what sounded to me like a suppressed grin, “I have a couple of late additions to the team.”

“ _And lady,_ ” someone had called out from the back in a low-pitched but identifiably female voice, and the silence broke like an ice sheet and everyone laughed, and even Makado rolled her eye.

“Alright, Elena,” she said. “And lady. Ladies, I should say, now,” twisting around to nod at me. I didn’t understand what she wanted for a moment but then I realized and I took a step forward and peered out at the faces peering out at me then raised my hand in a perfunctory greeting.

“Uh, hi.”

Dead silence. My eyes scanned over rugged faces, bearded and beardless, all seemingly male. There were grins and chuckles and nudges but I expected that somehow, it doesn’t surprise me. I’m an intruder; this is a _team_.

Someone wolf-whistled and even though I nearly burst out laughing, from next to me I heard Makado suck in her breath, I could practically feel her temperature shift from tolerably warm to unbearably frosty, and then the woman who’d called out before, Elena, had stood up and grinned at me.

“About damn time!” she’d crowed, looking around at the rest of the guys. “Too much of a damn sausage party in this team.”

And then everyone laughed again and I was smiling and Elena motioned to me and I looked over at Makado, feeling a little like I was a new kid at a playground asking my mom if I could go play with all of these weird kids I’d never seen before. She grinned at me, openly then, and again I thought I saw what Peter saw four years ago. Something in me ached and I thought Makado must have seen it as well because her smile lost a couple of molars; she looked at me cautiously for a moment before clapping her hands to regain the room’s attention.

“Everybody,” she said, “this is Roan, uh, Merriweather. She’s from Admin, she’s going to be filling in for that CIA team they were sending over to accompany you on the expedition.”

Somebody groaned and made a face at me, and someone else from the back yelled out “Admin sucks!”

Back to playing a role, I thought to myself. Then, a second later, I shrugged. Everybody loves an Uncle Tom.

“Yeah, Admin sucks,” I called back. “That’s why I’m _here_!”

Cheers and scattered whooping. I nudged Makado, leaned in towards her. “Thanks,” I murmured. She gave me a friendly squeeze on the upper arm, and then pushed me away gently.

“Don’t fuck it up,” she told me.

I made my way through the ranks over to Elena, flashed a hesitant smile at her, and she grinned and made a space for me next to her on the bunk. “Christ,” she said, “it’s been way too fucking long since we’ve had another girl in this outfit. How many trips you done?”

“Sorry?”

“You know,” she said, giving me a look. “How many times you’ve been down?”

I took my eyes off of Makado, who was now speaking to a tall, shirtless, blonde-haired man with muscles so rippling his chest looked like the start of an ocean, and glanced over at Elena. “Uh, this’ll be my first.”

Over on the other side of the barracks the game of darts was starting back up again, and on the bunk next to us a wiry black man with a goatee was reaching down under the cot and taking out a bottle of liquor surreptitiously, his eyes still on Makado. He saw me watching and grinned, then reached out his hand for me to shake.

“Ellis,” he said. “Ellis Hughes. I’m the resident nerd.”

His palm was very warm but also very dry.

“Roan,” I told him. “I’m the camerawoman.”

“You want some?”

“Maybe later, I don’t drink much –“

“This is your first trip?” Elena asked me, her voice serious. Ellis leaned over, frowning.

“Say what now?”

“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “I’m just there to –“

“What’s the big deal!” Elena laughed. “Are you serious? This is going to be your first trip?”

“Well, yeah,” I said, feeling myself flushing. “Is there something wrong - ?”

Elena got up in a hurry and stormed over to Makado, pushing the blonde man out of the way, who rolled his eyes and made a face at her before sauntering over to the dart game and throwing his arms over the shoulders of the two others who were waiting to play. I looked over at Ellis. “Did I say something wrong?”

He licked his lips and thought about it for a moment, trying to decide how to put it. “Let’s just say that this isn’t going to be a picnic.”

Something in me bristled at that. “I can assure you I’m more than capable –“

“And I’m sure you are too,” he said quickly, flashing a bright grin at me. “But like I said, this ain’t a picnic. Just being ‘capable’ might not cut it. I mean, do you know how to use a personal stent? Or a laser cutter? Or –“

“Oh, give it a rest, Ellis,” someone groaned from the floor on the other side of Elena’s cot, and then the speaker sat up and a shaggy head rose into view. He tossed his head, knocked some of the hair out of his eyes, and looked me up and down. “She’s gonna be fine.”

Over near the door Makado’s eyes flicked over to mine and then back to Elena, who was still speaking to her animatedly, talking, I now felt sure, about how unsuited I was. I felt a hard little knot writhing in my stomach but I did my best to quash it and instead looked over at the man on the floor. “So what’s your thing?” I asked him.

“Eh?” he grunted.

“You know,” I shrugged, cutting my eyes over at Ellis. “He says he’s the nerd. What do you do?”

“Fumi does maps,” Ellis said. “We get lost, it’s his fault.”

“It isn’t my fault if you lot don’t understand how to read a three-d projection,” Fumi said. “When we got lost in the Village two months ago –“

“See,” Ellis said to me, “Fumi talks a lot of shit, but –“

The door creaked open again and everyone quieted down, and then Peter walked in and the barracks exploded. Even Fumi, who I had initially taken to be the reserved, laid-back type, burst out a quiet profanity and bolted to his feet to join the crowd gathering around Peter, shaking his hand and clapping him on the back and asking him where the hell he’d been, man, we all thought he was dead!

Mixed feelings. On one hand, good to have attention taken off me, especially if I was going to have to pretend to be someone else. Peter was smiling harder than I’d ever seen him smile before and I felt happy for him. I’d had no idea that he was so loved here. He must have really made friends during the period he worked for the company, after the disaster. And then there’s Makado, standing then, moving closely to Peter’s side and grinning broadly, unable to even pretend to be reserved. They stood side to side there for a long while and while I couldn’t see through the crowd surrounding them I would have liked to have believed that they were holding hands.

Eventually everybody crowded out, I think there was some talk of a trip to a pub or bar or something, and I was left alone in the barracks. I picked out one of the unused cots and laid on it for a long while thinking until finally sleep came to me, and when everyone came back in loud and drunk and merry I woke but pretended not to.

“Cat got your tongue?” Elena asks me and I grunt, look over at her, then shut my locker.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just thinking.”

“Don’t let everyone get you down,” Elena says, and I process that for a moment, and I shake my head.

“I don’t understand you,” I tell her. “First you’re happy to see me cause there’ll be another woman in the group, and I can understand that. Then you’re concerned because I’m not a crack special ops Green Beret motherfucker –“

“That isn’t –“

“And now when I’m justifiably concerned about goddam blood-borne –“

“Jesus Christ,” she groans. “I wasn’t going to actually lick the glove. I was just trying to freak you out. Make you reconsider coming on this damn-fool errand we’re stuck with. You can tell Veret no, you know that, right? She’s Sec, you’re Admin, she has zero jurisdiction over you. You can tell her where to fucking stick it and she can’t say shit.”

It takes me a moment to realize that she’s talking about Makado. “What if I want to go?” I ask.

Elena looks me dead in the eyes. Hers are very grey, the same color as a cloudy day. “You’re going to die down there,” she assures me.

I blow an exasperated breath out. “You care that much?” I ask her. “Seriously? You’ve barely spoken a word to me since the day we met. It’s like you’re mad at me for – for just having the misfortune to be here. You think I have control over this? They need someone to run the camera, I’ve got the experience. Between, well, everyone gradually realizing how useless I’m going to be down there and my pathetic performance the other day at the range –“ I wince to myself at the memory of it, at how I couldn’t handle even the littlest pistol they’d had - “I’ve had a goddam miserable time here and I don’t want this entire expedition to be like that. Do you have a problem with me?”

“No,” Elena says firmly.

“Then what the hell are you treating me like this for?”

She thinks about it for a moment then shrugs. “Trying to scare you off, I guess,” she explains. “If nothing else you’ve got guts. I just don’t want you to get killed because of overconfidence –“

“Oh, trust me, I’m far from overconfident.”

“No,” Elena says, “I suppose you aren’t. There’s some sort of angle you’re working, isn’t there? Did Miller put you up to something? Spying on Veret, or on –“

“Who’s – “ I start, and then stop myself. Clearly this Miller is someone I ought to know. “No,” I tell her. “There’s no angle. I just want to go down there, see what it’s like. I’ve seen videos,” I say, thinking quickly, “I’ve seen footage, but that’s not even close to what it’s really like. Isn’t it?”

“You’re right,” Elena laughs, “it isn’t.”

And then she turns away, sits down on the bench to do up her shoes and I stand there staring at her for a moment before I shake my head and gather my things and turn to leave. I almost make it to the door before she calls after me.

“I don’t hate you,” she says, and I turn and look at her, meet the gaze she’s flinging at me with what I hope is stoniness, trying not to feel like a lonely puppy. I’m tired, I’m fatigued, part of me wants to go the hell back home and get out of Gumption but another part of me wants to see what the hell is down there in the Pit. I’ve barely seen Peter since that first day and I haven’t seen Makado at all, and I haven’t had the guts to pull out my phone and call anybody from work, or any of my friends. I can feel my heart practically flipping over onto its back and begging for belly-rubs no matter how hard I try to stomp down on it.

And then, of course, there’s the little voice in the back of my mind that keeps whispering about whether or not I might be able to get my hands on some ballast…

No, it’s stupid. It isn’t an option. They’ve probably got it locked down so tightly –

Focus, Roan. One thing at a time. Don’t be such a goddam nitrogen queen.

“I know you don’t hate me,” I tell her, taking a step back towards the door. “But you’ve sure been doing your best to make it seem like you do.”

She offers me a slow smile, and as she rises I once again take the chance to admire the wiry strength of her arms, the sloping incline of her thighs, the taper of her stomach. She’s very pretty, after all; I don’t know what it is but I was expecting something more like Vasquez from _Aliens_ , a wiry woman constantly on-edge, not willing to take any shit at all, but Elena is much more –

“You checking me out, Merriweather?”

I blush instantly and reluctantly drag my eyes back up to meet hers. She looks smug. “You swing that way?”

If I lie I’ll look even weaker. Yes, self-possession is the way to go. I look at her and crack a carefully crooked grin in her direction. “I think the better question is whether _you_ do.”

She laughs at that and I laugh too, but I think she is looking at me a little differently afterwards, but I can’t tell whether it’s in a good way or a bad way, and then Elena tells me she wants to show me something and we leave the gym together and she takes me not towards the barracks but out the other way, into the scrub grass and clear wind.

* * *

“What about…” I squint. “Eleanor Kovacs?”

“It’s pronounced _Kovacs_.”

“Oh. What happened to her?”

“Cratered when a BFR she thought was bomb-proof wasn’t so bomb-proof after all.”

“What the fuck does that even _mean_?”

Elena laughs. “A BFR is a Big Fucking Rock. Down in the Pit it’s mostly calcium deposits that that refers to, so they’re not really rocks. It’s just old caving slang left-over from the guys in the 70s that explored the place for the first time. ‘Bomb-proof’ means that it’s secure, if you tie a line to it and let yourself down it won’t drop you.”

“And ‘cratered?’”

“I’m sure you can guess what that one means.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah. I liked Eleanor, she was nice, but you never trust a BFR.”

Down here, around the bend and down a ways, over the tiny trickle of a stream that bubbles over dusty rocks and down into a drainage ditch and from there beyond the fence, past another thicket of brush, there is a small cemetery with about eight headstones in it, and green grass, and a few still fairly intact wreaths that look like they’re only a couple of days old.

“How long ago did that happen?”

Elena thinks for a moment. “About a year ago. So probably a little before or after you got hired, right? I think you said you’d been here for a year.”

I did say that. I’d debating going a little shorter, maybe six months or so, but I felt like if I pretended I’d been here for much shorter than a year it’d be suspicious as to why Makado had picked me out specifically instead of someone with more seniority.

“That’s right,” I said. “I think I might have heard something about it? I think it was like a month before I joined.”

“You said you were a photographer before this?”

“Um,” I grunt. I want rather much to get away from talking about my fake history, especially because it’d be fairly easy for me to give away that I don’t actually work here and not even know it. “That’s not entirely accurate, but close enough.”

She looks at me for a moment then shrugs. “Alright, miss mysterious, be that way.”

“What about this one?” I ask, pointing to one of the more weathered headstones. Elena peers at it then shakes her head.

“I don’t know, that was before my time.”

“When did you join?”

“Three years ago. Got out of the Coast Guard and didn’t really know what else to do, somebody here had heard about me and sent an offer my way and I said ‘what the hell’ and signed on.”

“You were in the Coast Guard?”

“Yeah, I was a cave diver.”

I look at Elena, really look at her, thoughtfully this time. She’s staring at the headstone, she hasn’t drawn the long aquiline arch of her neck back up. She’s thinking about something, some inward private musing that, even if I asked her and even if she wanted to tell me, I would never be able to know the length and breadth and depth of.

I want to reach out and touch her hand and hold it in mine but I restrain myself. Her eyes flick over to me and then her head turns to me slightly and she frowns. “What?” she asks.

“I was just thinking.”

“You do a lot of thinking while you’re just staring at people?”

I shrug diffidently. “It’s a bad habit of mine.”

I can see her trying not to smile.

The radio clipped to Elena’s belt bleeps at her and the moment is instantly shattered. She tugs it out, muttering a muffled curse, and clicks it on. “Yeah?”

“Elena, it’s Fumi. We’re finally getting briefed in ten, where are you?”

“At the gym,” she says quickly. “Just leaving now.”

“You are? I’m at the gym.”

Elena closes her eyes and makes a face at me; I clap a hand over my mouth so I don’t laugh. “Must have just missed you,” she tells him.

“Have you seen that girl from Admin, too? They told me to call everybody but I can’t get ahold of her.”

“She probably left her radio with her stuff,” Elena says, flashing me a little smirk. “Fucking Admin.”

I feign affront. Over the radio Fumi laughs.

“Fucking Admin,” he agrees. “Still, though, admin or not, have you seen her body? I wouldn’t mind –“

“Keep it in your pants,” she tells him. “Out.”

“Out,” he laughs.

I laugh but it sounds wrong, I sound nervous. Or maybe just awkward.

“Don’t let it get to you,” Elena tells me. “Just guy talk.”

“Mm,” I grunt, then look down at myself. “Not sure what he meant, to be honest.”

“Eh?”

“Well, if he likes skinny little skeletons, I guess…”

Elena laughs again. She has a low, slow laugh, like waves, like granite. “I don’t think that’s how I’d put it.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. I use the upcoming prospect of having to leave for the briefing as a pretense to pat myself down, make sure I have all of my effects (none of which I took out, of course, but even so), and in so doing take a step closer to her. I see Elena’s eyes narrow fractionally but in an even-tempered way. “How would you put it?” I ask her.

We’re very close now. I can smell her, something vague and salty and fresh-smelling, like how I imagine a particularly clean crocodile might smell. I can hear her lips draw back in a smile.

“How I would put it?”

“Yeah,” I breathe. I very deliberately flick my eyes downwards to her lips and then back up again.

The radio squawks again and I jump slightly. Elena sighs and then turns around and walks away, very deliberately not looking back at me. I bite my lip and content myself with watching the slow roll of her hips as she walks away, and then she turns, radio near her chin. “Yeah,” she says into it, “I found her. Tell them we’ll be there in five.”

“Ack.”

“Ack?” I ask.

“Acknowledged.”

“Oh.”

Then there is nothing more to say and we walk back together and I use the time to wonder what the hell I’m doing and whether or not, if that radio hadn’t interrupted, I would have had the guts to kiss her. “First time for everything,” I mutter to myself, and shrug when Elena looks over at me curiously.

* * *

“This is what we’re after,” Makado says, clicking to the next slide. I frown.

“What the hell is that?” someone asks from up near the front row – I think it might be Crookshank, the heavy-set, bear-faced man that Ellis had introduced to me as the team’s resident medic.

“That, Mr. Crookshank,” Makado says, her eye flashing, “is a resonating pressure crystal.”

“What the hell is a resonating pressure crystal?” he asks, and I hear a few chuckles from the middle rows. Makado grins at him.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s need to know, and…”

“And we don’t need to know,” a half-dozen voices intone simultaneously, prompting more titters afterwards. Some sort of in-joke.

“How big is this thing?” Ellis asks.

“The team that initially discovered it down near Blue Matter reported that it was roughly two hundred kilograms or so. Dimensions are…I don’t know, a dresser? Chest of drawers? Something like that.”

“Are those bits sharp?” someone asks.

“I don’t know,” Makado says, a thin whisper of impatience lurking in the back of her voice. “Probably.”

“Where is this crystal now?” Fumi asks. Next to me Elena uncrosses and recrosses her legs.

“This is the part you probably aren’t going to like,” Makado says. “The team that had found it called for help retrieving it, and one of the cargo IAVs was dispatched down to assist. We lost radio contact with the team halfway down, and when the IAV got there, the team and the crystal were gone.”

“Whose team was it?” Elena asks. Whatever levity might have been fluttering around the room before is long gone by now.

“It was a science team,” Makado says. “Nobody you all would know, most likely. I believe the leader was Nguyen, he’s a researcher.”

“And this crystal is important enough to send us down after it, even if we don’t know what the hell happened or where it is?”

“Yes,” Peter says, squinting against the light of the projector as he looks over from the computer desk up at the front. “It’s that important.”

“But you can’t tell us why?” I call out. I don’t know what makes me do it. Just wanting to be part of the team. Makado gives me a look but a very subdued one.

“No,” she says, “I can’t. You all know me,” she says, her eye lingering on me. “You know if I could I would, if I could bend the rules, even, and tell you, but I can’t. And, the point I was going to make before we got sidetracked, we actually do know exactly where the crystal is. The science team managed to fit it with a tracker before whatever happened happened.”

She takes a breath, blows it out. “We found copepod castings at the site, and the tracker shows the crystal is currently in the barrows.”

It’s Greek to me but everybody else reacts hard. Elena leans forward and puts her head in her hands and half of the rest of them get to their feet, gesticulating, Ellis and Fumi among them.

“Hell no,” Ellis says.

“That’s a goddam suicide mission,” Fumi tells Makado, and when I flick my eyes over to her to judge her reaction I can see that she thinks so too; it’s there in the cast of her face, just for a moment, before she composes herself.

“Everybody relax,” Peter says, and, miraculously, almost everyone does.

“Look,” Crookshank says, still on his feet, pointing at the crystal still on the screen, “even if this thing is so goddam important that we die getting it back, even if we manage to beat off the hundreds of fucking copepods down there in the barrows, how the hell are we going to get it up here? Another IAV? They can’t fit into the barrows, the passages are too tight and twisting. We can’t carry 200 kilograms up here, we can’t –“

“Crookshank,” Makado says, voice icy, “sit down.”

He wavers for a moment but sits. Makado clears her throat.

“You aren’t going to carry it.”

I frown. The crystal on the screen looks damn near impossible to carry anyway. A wicked constellation of dagger-sharp jade barbs and spikes and serrations surrounding a gnarled, crenellated core. Even if it were smaller and lighter I don’t know how you could pick it up without hurting either it, yourself, or both. Elena looks over at me frowning and I shrug; I don’t know where the hell Makado is going with this.

“He is,” she says, pointing over at the door.

As we all turn, it opens softly, and with careful, hissing, precise steps, a machine walking upright on two pistoning, powerful, articulated legs steps inside, one of its powerful-looking blocky arms reaching backward and catching the door by the handle and shutting it very softly behind it. Its head is a cube with a few careful angled shavings taking out of it, and in the recesses they create lights blink, but there is nothing so crude as a camera lens to show that it looks at us as it swings its face back and forth, like a lizard tasting the air.

The room has gone so silent that the only sound I can hear is the whine of servos as it steps further in, and for a moment I feel vertigo swelling in my stomach, as though the floor has dropped out from under me, as though the pit I’ve fallen into has become bottomless.


	2. Chapter 2

As the loud, clanging gunshot rings out again, Elena gives me a sympathetic look and leans in a little closer to me. I gingerly take my hands away from my ears, but when she speaks I still can’t hear her through the earplugs. I reach up and start to take them out but she gives me a look and smacks my hand back down, and then she is tucking my hair back behind my ear and fiddling with the plugs. She presses down gently and the earplugs slip in a tiny bit further and then I truly can’t hear; I guess I just hadn’t inserted them all the way. I flash her a grin and a thumbs-up and she smiles at me a little indulgently. My back is still prickling deliciously from the sweeping, wavy thrill that trickled down it when she touched me and my eyes linger on her a little longer while she crosses her arms again, leans up against the painted brick wall of the firing range.

Ahead of us in the central stall, the robot and the tall, slim man with the joysticked control box are looking for more targets. The robot is holding the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen one-handed, and though the shells it spits out with each trigger-pull have got to be the size of Coke cans – okay, maybe not that big, maybe about the size of a mediumish pill-bottle – it handles the recoil without any strain at all.

Down further the overhead rack whines and sends a dinner-plate sized target whizzing across the line again. The robot’s head tracks it for a moment before with a single swift and precise motion it flicks the barrel of the gun to the left and pulls the trigger. I wince again, less from the sound of it now, thanks to Elena’s help, and more due to the resonating shockwave of it throbbing in my chest.

The man with the joystick toggles something on it and the robot racks the bolt of the rifle, tilts it skyward to check the chamber, and then ejects the massive magazine and puts it on the table before it.

“As you can see,” the man says, looking around at us, “this new model of armature skeleton is the most advanced yet. We’ve put absolutely everything into this bad boy,” he grins, slapping the chest plate of the robot; it doesn’t react. “Gyroscopic stabilizers, redundant systems in practically every area, newest cyborg processors, the works.”

“You said you were from Europe, right?” Ellis asks, and the man nods.

“That’s correct. This is going to be a bit of a joint venture. As I mentioned before I’m Max Euler, one of the scientists from Anodyne Berlin’s robotics department. We reached out to the administration here,” he says, nodding to Makado, “when we felt that the skeleton was in the final phases of testing and could really do with an…extremely adverse environment to put it through its paces. Then, when we discovered that you were facing a certain difficulty retrieving an artifact, well, everything seemed serendipitous.”

“You don’t sound very German,” I observe. A few heads twist around to look at me and I can see Makado hide a smile. Euler doesn’t miss a beat, though.

“I actually learned English in America,” he tells me. “That’s why I don’t have an accent when I speak it. Deep-immersion in a culture is the best way to learn, I believe. Now, do we have any other questions about myself or the armature or has its performance spoken for itself?”

To be fair, he has a point; the thing’s performance was very impressive. Over the past couple of hours we watched him demonstrate its speed, its agility, its coordination…everything that would interest the men and women on the team with ex-military backgrounds, which, from what I gathered from the past couple of days, was the majority. I think only Crookshank and another man I had met only briefly before he’d disappeared again, a short, sinewy, compact individual who introduced himself with a wide, flashing grin as Klaus, just Klaus, weren’t. Well, possibly Elena, actually. Is the Coast Guard part of the military? I don’t know. I think so but I’m not certain. I should ask her if I ever manage to get her alone again.

Alone. That’s a laugh. These past couple of days in the barracks have been a decidedly different experience than what I’m used to. I’m not a particularly shy person and I’m confident enough that I’ve never had any real reservations about my body, but the absolute lack of privacy is something I’ve never really experienced before. I got used to it quickly enough, changing in front of everybody. The first time I was motivated mainly because I knew for certain that if I made a big deal of it I’d be taken even less seriously. Aww, look at the little baby, wants us to turn around while she puts a new shirt on? How cute! She thinks we’ve never seen a pair of tits before!

I guess if I want to psychoanalyze myself I could ask why I want to fit in so badly with these people, but it’s obvious, isn’t it? Being the outsider aches, and even if you can fox-and-grapes yourself into believing that it’s okay because you’re “better” than them, you’re always going to know how much bull that is, somewhere deep down.

As far as becoming part of a team goes, you can either have it built in or have it be something you build up. If I came here and I was a male ex-Marine or even something like a paramedic, or perhaps even a lineman (power line lineman, not football lineman), I’d be much more easily accepted. Not that I think the fact that I’m a woman really has much to do with it; it’s about experiences. What the hell does a reporter know about Real World Things, like how to build a fire or pitch a tent or hide food where a bear can’t get it? Or how to fire a gun, splint an injured leg?

I know how to do some of those things, to be fair. But I don’t have the credentials. Instead I have to build it up, I have to be willing to learn, I have to put in work without complaining, I have to play ball no matter what. Challenging an institution, even a little one like a team like this, is impossible until you get inside of it. You say something like, ‘uh, I think I’d prefer to have all of you not stare at my tits while I change my shirt’ and boom, all the goodwill you’ve built up is gone. You have to play ball.

“Roan?” Makado asks again, sidling up to me while Euler prattles on about something else up in front. I take another look at him and the robot and flick my eyes over to Makado.

“Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. What’s up?”

“I want to show you the recording equipment we’ve got for you.”

We slip out of the firing range and head down the hallway, Makado’s heeled footsteps echoing off the tight corridor ceiling. She’s wearing her hair down today, with a broad headband resting high up on her forehead to keep those unruly curls in line. “Makado,” I say after a moment, “can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How dangerous is this going to be?”

She stops, turns and looks at me. Her lopsided gaze is calculating. “Very, I’d imagine,” she says eventually.

“Mm.”

“Why, are you having second thoughts?”

“No,” I tell her, “not particularly. I just wanted to – mentally prepare myself.”

“You know,” she says after a moment, “I was pretty certain you were going to chicken out.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I assumed, you know, throw you to the wolves for a day or two in the barracks with the team, you’d get scared enough to realize this is a bad idea.”

“They’ve been decent to me, actually.”

“As they would have been to anybody,” she smiles, guiding us around a corner. “But I think you might find that my, and apparently your, definition of ‘decent’ might not match with that of a lot of other twenty-something female reporters.”

“If I quit, who’d work the camera?”

“It’s a camera,” Makado laughs. “How hard can it be?”

“Show me the camera and I’ll tell you.”

She shows me the camera and then blushes after a moment. “Christ,” she says. “Stop laughing, it’s a _camera_.”

“This is what you’re going to use? Where’d you get this, Walmart?”

“Look, our budget isn’t –“

“How much did this cost? A hundred bucks?”

Makado looks at me for a moment. “Eighty,” she says finally. I knead the bridge of my nose.

“I literally have a four hundred dollar camera in my bag back in the barracks that could take better video than this,” I say, “and that’s my backup SLR.”

“SLR?” Makado frowns. I wave it away.

“It’s a kind of camera. Mine’s digital, it can take stills or video. I have…I think three or four memory cards left? So probably about 60 hours of video, I’d guess. More if you’re okay with thirty frames per second instead of sixty. What’s the video going to be used for?”

“It’s classified,” Makado says. “I can’t –“

“Do you want good video or not?”

She rolls her eyes at me. “The CIA were sending a team down to record the operation because they think they’ve found a similar environment somewhere in the Middle East. The site director absolutely wouldn’t allow them to send a team in here to train in the Pit because some of the things they wanted to do were going to be very destructive, so in the end they compromised on just taking video the whole time.”

“See? Was that so hard?”

“If you breathe a word of that to anyone –“

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I growl, setting the camera back down on the table. “You’re being awfully free with the secrets, Makado.”

“Are you complaining?”

“No,” I tell her. “Absolutely not. But for someone with such a suspicion of journalists –“

“Who would you tell?” she says simply. “We’d know it was you. I think it’s fine.”

“Then what’s the deal with the crystal? Why is it so important?”

“Don’t press your luck. This camera you have, how fragile is it?”

I laugh. “About as fragile as this one, relatively,” I point. “Maybe a little more. If it breaks down there I’ll want an assurance that you’ll replace it.”

“If it’s in the budget.”

“A _personal_ assurance for my personal camera,” I elaborate. She looks at me dubiously.

“You want me to buy you a new camera with my own money?”

“If it breaks.”

“When did this turn into a negotiation?” she asks. Her voice is exasperated but I can tell that she wants to smile. “Fine. How about this? If you break your camera but the footage is usable, I’ll get you a new one. No footage, no camera.”

“Alright.”

“And you’re taking this one as well, as a backup.”

“Fine. I’ll need to get my charger, though.”

“For the batteries? You don’t have it with you?”

“If you recall, I thought I was just going to be coming in and then leaving the same night. I didn’t plan on getting caught up in this adventure of yours. My charger’s back at my motel room in town.”

“Guess we’d better go get it, then.”

And then Makado is putting her arm around my shoulder and ushering me out of the dingy storage closet, and then out of the building entirely.

* * *

“You know,” I say as the little Volkswagen powers down the main road and out the gate, Makado giving a cheery wave to the guard in the gatehouse as she passes, “this really isn’t the sort of car I was expecting you’d drive.”

She laughs. “You and everybody else. See, this actually used to be my aunt’s car. She won the lottery, bought herself a new car, gave me this one, and I was like, ‘hey, what the hell, free car, might as well use it’ and from there it grew on me.”

“It’s so tiny.”

“If you turn that into a crack about my height, you’re walking back to the Flesh Pit.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I laugh. “Although you are kind of fulfilling the stereotype by being so touchy about it.”

“That’s it –“

“I’m joking.”

“I know,” she says, flashing me a quick grin.

The world outside is like a bright warm hug. I realized as soon as Makado lead me out of the squat, evil-looking concrete Security building that for the last three days in the barracks I had been suffering from a myopia of purpose; I’d done little more than work out in the gym, steal lingering glances at Elena, and play wallflower, listening to the team laugh and joke and riff off each other. If I were to close my eyes, here in the car, with the top down, trailing my hand in the breeze, I’d be asleep in five minutes.

“You look peaceful,” Makado observes, and I crack an eye open, fix her with what I hope is a sardonic gaze.

“Do I not normally look peaceful?”

“Well, considering I’ve known you for about four days now, and about half of those we were both wondering if I was going to have to send you to federal prison, I’d say that generally you haven’t looked very peaceful.”

“Fair point.”

We drive on in silence for a little longer. “You know,” she says, “there’s no shame in backing out.”

“If you didn’t want me to go you shouldn’t have offered,” I tell her. “It’s too late now.”

“If you want the truth, I did it more for Peter than for you.”

“I know you did,” I tell her. I can tell from the way she looks at me that she wasn’t expecting me to have realized that.

“He likes you, you know,” she tells me.

I look over at Makado, really look at her. I look at the lines of the tendons in her neck, loose and ropy but ready to spring into life and brace at a moment’s notice. I look at her cheeks and her eye and her lips, at the way she grips the wheel loosely in one hand, the other hand draped over the edge of the rolled-down window. She glances over, catches me staring. “Have you told him yet?”

I let out a little burst of mirthless laughter. “I haven’t even been able to tell my dad yet.”

“Why not?”

“Why haven’t I told my dad or why haven’t I told Pete?”

“I meant Pete.”

I roll the words around on my tongue for a long, long time before I finally say them. “Because Pete might like me, but he still loves you.”

Makado lets out a breath like I’d punched her, and I look over at her incredulously. “Oh, come on,” I say. “You couldn’t tell? Have you _seen_ the way he looks at you?”

“I don’t –“

“I don’t know what happened between the two of you, not exactly, but I know for a fact that he still has feelings for you.”

“I thought you and him…”

“Let’s just say I’m probably not going to be interested in men for a while,” I say. “Maybe for the rest of my life,” I add with a hollow laugh.

“That isn’t funny,” Makado says quickly. “And what do you – oh.”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. Hell, if I were in her position I wouldn’t know what to say about it.

It feels good to tell someone.

“Are you scared?” she asks, glancing over again.

“It doesn’t feel real yet,” I tell her. “I got the letter with the results about a week ago. They wanted me to come back in and ‘discuss my options’ but there aren’t any. Once I get sick I’ll be scared, I imagine.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You probably don’t want sympathy, but…”

“The only thing I don’t want is someone treating me differently, that’s all. Maybe I’m dying but this is going to be a long slow goodbye. And right now I still feel fine,” I say, wondering if I really believe it.

“I was meaning to tell you,” Makado says after a moment. “I think I can get you some ballast.”

I look at her sharply; she keeps her head still, eye on the road. “You’re serious?” I ask after a moment.

“Dead serious.”

“How?”

“The suits the team wears, the locator is in the helmet. At the end of the first day, you guys will make camp right near a ballast bulb. You do the math.”

I think about that for a moment, then shrug.

“Seems easy enough. Would it even help me?”

“It might. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Isn’t it worth a shot?”

“Sure. But what if…I don’t know, what are the side effects?”

Makado laughs. “Well, undiluted ballast…you’ll get really fucking horny. You’ll probably want to drink it right there so you don’t have to worry about hiding a fucking bottle of it from everyone. And it’s going to taste really, really gross.”

“I meant more like physiological stuff.”

“As far as I know it’s mildly addictive but nobody ever figured out if it was actually chemically addictive or if it was a mental thing. Like, the difference between coffee and cigarettes being addictive.”

“Speaking of,” I say. “You smoke?”

“I don’t.”

“Good,” I tell her. “Nasty habit.”

“Okay, miss two-packs-a-day.”

“Ouch. Low blow.”

“Did you always smoke that much?”

She pulls back onto the main road and then turns onto the side street that leads down to the motel. By daylight Gumption looks even sadder than at night. Fewer shadows to hide the cracks.

“No,” I tell her. “I used to smoke about a pack a week or so.”

“Let me guess,” she says. “When you found out you said ‘fuck it’ and started going all in?”

“Seemed like the thing to do,” I say. “I like nicotine, just not a fan of smoking, necessarily. Too concerned about my lungs’ wellbeing.”

“Right,” she agrees. “Alright, we’re here.”

The warm, dry air has sucked all the life out of me. “Alright,” I say, not opening my eyes. “The charger is on the nightstand, you can just run up and get it…”

“Go and get your damn charger.”

I groan, pop the door, stagger out of the low-slung Beetle. “Question for you,” I say, leaning back in.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you personally taking the time to drive me around?”

Makado laughs. “Do you know how busy I am as the Head of Security?”

“Very, I’d imagine.”

“I’m not busy at all. Place runs itself unless there’s an emergency. I do about two hours of phone calls and emails per night sitting in my quarters in my pajamas, rest of the time I just hang around and pretend to do something, anything, that justifies my salary.”

I can’t help but smile at her. “Glad I could give you something to do, then.”

“Go get your charger,” she repeats, reclining the seat backwards. She unclips her seat belt and shuts her eyes. “I’ll be right here.”

* * *

I can tell someone’s been in the room the minute I walk in. I’d left the do not disturb sign on the handle, they’ve taken it off, left it on the floor right in front of the door. I stare; then there is a soft, subtle sound from inside the room and I take a step back, reach behind me for the door handle.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Erica Walken tells me, stepping out from the bathroom. She has in her hand a small revolver, held about waist-high, barrel pointed unwaveringly at me.

It isn’t much to look at, that little gun, the barrel glinting in the low, warm light cast by the lamp over on the bedside table. The inside of the barrel seems like it must be the blackest, darkest, heaviest thing I’ve ever seen, and it draws my eyes to it like it were a singularity. Forget movies, forget books, if you have a gun pointed at you there’s no way to be cool, no way to just quip out a one-liner like in a movie. I could feel my hands shaking at my sides and if I didn’t get a grip on myself my legs were going to follow suit. I’ll be damned if I’m not going to at least _try_ a one-liner. When’s the next time I’ll get the chance?

“Put the gun down,” I tell her. My voice almost trembles but I lock it down.

“No,” she says. “Did you come alone?”

“Yes. What the hell do you want?”

“You’ve been a hard woman to track down for the last couple of days. Sit down.”

She jerks the gun at the armchair in the corner and I move slowly to it, my back prickling with the knowledge that she’s still holding the gun on me, and sit.

She stares at me for a moment longer. “Are you working for the Company?” she asks me, and something in the way she says it, in the way she’s looking at me, makes me think that this is a capital-letter Very Important Question.

“The Containment Corporation?” I ask, trying hard to keep my voice innocent. She waves an irritated hand.

“The Containment Corp, Anodyne, whoever. You know what I mean.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then why the hell are you back?” she growls. “I know you went with Peter, even though I told you not to, and when you and he disappeared I knew they must have caught you. What the hell are you doing back here?”

“What the hell are you doing in my room?” I snarl back at her. She tosses her head, looks down her nose at me.

“Looking for answers,” she says. “I have a right to know –“

“Lady, I don’t know who you think you are but if you think I’m going to overlook the fact that you _broke_ into my motel room –“

“Answer the question,” she tells me. She moves her thumb and draws the hammer on the revolver back and it locks into place with an ominous click.

“No,” I tell her. “I’m not working for them.”

She stares at me for a long while and I stare back at her, keep my face carefully blasé. “Alright,” she says quietly. “What happened? Why haven’t I been able to get in touch with Peter? My boy tried to get out of the Pit and he told me that the ditch had been filled in with concrete, he was trapped in there.”

“Your boy?”

She waves her hand impatiently. “The young man who went in there with you. Marcus.”

“Oh. I didn’t know they’d filled in the ditch,” I say softly.

“Well, they did. He can’t get out.”

“Where is he now?”

“Back in the Pit, of course. He wouldn’t have lasted a day out there on the surface, he’d have been caught in an instant. What happened to Peter? Why can’t I get him on the phone?”

I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words carefully.

“They caught Peter,” I tell her. “I don’t know what happened to him. I only just managed to get away.”

Her eyes narrow. “Bullshit,” she says, the word sounding out of place in her small, elegant mouth. “You’re working for them.”

I can see her knuckles whiten on the grip of the pistol. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

“I can get him out,” I say quickly. “Marcus, I mean.”

“How?” she asks.

 _Yes, Roan, how?_ the little voice asks somewhere from the back of my head, and I close my eyes. “They made me a deal,” I say slowly. Maybe it’s pathetic but I feel a little better not being able to see the gun. “I’m going into the Pit. Tomorrow or the next day. I can find him, get him out of there.”

“And turn him right in to the Company?” she snorts. “Fat chance.”

“If you shoot me,” I say with sudden confidence, “you’re never going to see him again. He’s going to die down there and you won’t be able to get him back.”

Erica’s mouth is a tight line. Her eyes are like chips of obsidian. “And what do I have for assurance that you’ll help?” she asks.

I think about it for a moment, really think. “I’m working for them because I’m being forced to, I’ve got no love for them. I don’t want any more people to die because of this shit.”

A half-truth will have to do.

Erica blows a breath out. She looks very tired suddenly; she leans back against the counter and the gun finally wavers away from me. “Alright,” she says softly. “It looks like I –“

There is the soft snap of a card fitting into the lock and then the handle turns. My panicked eyes turn to Erica and I can see her raising the gun, mid-snarl. “Hide the gun!” I hiss urgently, and she stares at me for a frozen moment before the door opens all the way and Makado, holding a pistol of her own, a slim black automatic, peeks around the corner. Our eyes meet but she can’t see Erica, the woman is around the corner from her.

Erica is staring at me and I flick my eyes back to her; she hasn’t put the gun away and I try to implore her to with a look, but she’s having none of it. She moves to the wall and the floor creaks. Makado’s aim shifts up and over to the corner as Erica flattens herself against the wall, revolver extended ahead of her, head-height.

I feel as though I’m going to pass out but I know I have to do something, and finally after my anguished nerves have been screaming at me to move, to flex my muscles and _move_ , goddam it, I rise lurchingly, a sudden motion that seems in immediate retrospect to have been a very bad idea. Makado’s gun wavers for a moment but Erica swings around almost immediately and starts to get a bead on me. Makado rushes forward and bursts around the corner, knocking me to the floor in the process. I land hard and lay there for a moment, then I roll over. I see Makado on the ground, Erica on her knees, the two of them struggling over the revolver, Erica trying desperately to stuff her finger back into the trigger guard. I snap out a kick and catch her in the side and she whoops out a breath and lets the gun go for a moment. Makado jerks it away from Erica and I finally, finally see the outline of Makado’s pistol, discarded on the floor right in front of me, blending in with the dark carpet.

Before I can snatch it up Erica bolts to her feet, stepping on Makado’s forearm in the process, a yelp boiling out of Mak’s mouth as she wrenches her arm out from beneath Erica’s shoe, but Erica is already sprinting out the door, slamming it behind her. “Mak,” I say urgently, trying to hand her the gun, but Mak sees it and freezes, and then her eyes flick up to mine, wide and scared, and then I realize I’m pointing it right at her. “Shit,” I say, jerking the barrel away from her. “I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry –“

She reaches out, grabs it and takes it from my nerveless hands. “Grip first,” she says, and then clambers to her feet and rushes out the door after Erica.

By the time I manage to get to my feet and stagger out of the room after her, Roan is there leaning up against the balcony, revolver and pistol both slung away into one pocket or holster or other, watching the big black car roar out of the parking lot fast enough to leave twin streaks of black rubber in its wake.

“You okay?” I ask, breathless still, and Makado glances over, eye wide and limpid.

“Yeah. You?”

“I think so.”

She blows a breath out, inclines her head forward until her forehead rests on the cool metal bar of the balcony. I think about it for a moment before I do it, but then I reach over and gently lay my hand on her back, and I feel her stiffen and then relax. She has a terrible knot of muscle just above her shoulderblade and I work at it with my fingers, run my thumb over it in slow, firm strokes. “That’s nice,” she murmurs after a moment.

“You’re pretty tense,” I observe.

“Well, we both almost died, so…”

“How did you get in?”

“Oh, I made a copy of your keycard when we took your stuff the other night,” she says. “Might have come in handy later.”

“Good thing you did.”

“Never know when you’ll need something like that. We got lucky.”

“Peter told me that Erica’s with the cult,” I say, and Makado nods.

“Yeah,” she says. “What the hell was eating her, did she tell you? She can be a bit of a loose cannon but I’ve never seen her pull a fucking gun on anyone.”

“Peter let one of the cult people in for an initiation and now he’s trapped down there because y –“ I stop, rearrange my words. “Because they filled in the ditch with cement.”

“Ah,” Makado says lightly, “that would do it.”

She does smell like peaches, I realize suddenly, standing this close to her. Her back feels very warm beneath her thin shirt, and her skin has a muscley firmness to it that my fingertips find appealing.

“When she couldn’t get in touch with Peter,” I say, “I guess she panicked.”

“Goddam it,” Makado mutters. “This is my damn fault.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” I tell her. “We’re okay, nobody got shot. We should probably call the cops or somethi –“

“No,” Makado says, her voice sharp. “This _is_ my fault. I had them fill in that drainage pipe with concrete after Peter told me about it, I gave the order to shoot that night. I didn’t know, I thought you had a _plan_ , I thought that –“

“This is about the crystal, isn’t it?” I say thoughtfully. “It was just bad timing, our coming in when we did. You thought we were after it.”

She looks at me bleakly. “Yeah, I did. I didn’t know what to think so I made the call. Beginning to think it was a bad one.”

“Why can’t you tell –“

“Because you don’t need to know!” she snaps. “Because some things are supposed to stay secret.”

I take my hand off of her back. She shuts her eye. “I suppose now you’re going to be mad at me,” she offers, and I blow out a sigh, look out across the parking lot. I can see heat distortion off in the distance, out across the plains beyond the town limits, and in the distance I can see the electric fence.

“I’m not mad at you,” I say so softly that she has to ask me to repeat myself. I look down at her and give her a faint smile. “I’m not mad at you. I’m not – I’m not mad at anything, I guess, not the Pit, not the Corporation, not anything. I wish Rey didn’t have to die but if this crystal is so damn important then what else could you have done? He’d have thrown himself down that elevator shaft if you’d let him. Probably wouldn’t have done any damage, but -”

“A couple of years ago,” Makado says, straightening up, hands on her hips, twisting her back left and right, coaxing a deep crack from her spine like something heavy slotting into place. “A couple of years ago, we had someone get in with a bomb. He was schizophrenic. Convinced that the Pit was going to swallow the world whole. He sprinted for the orifice and if we didn’t put him down he would have dropped that bomb down there and it would have wrecked the gantry, would have hurt the Pit like fuck, maybe even gotten another choke response out of it. As it was it cracked the fuck out of the concrete exclusion plate, had to put in a new one.”

I can see ghosts swimming in her eye when she looks at me. “I can’t let that happen again. Even if it’s, fuck, ten times less severe than 2007, there’s eight guys down there in that control room in the monitoring station at all times who are counting on me not to let something like that happen.”

“You did the right thing, then,” I tell her, wondering if I’m lying.

“I – what?”

“You did the right thing,” I repeat. “I don’t know if I would have done anything different if I was in the same position, because you’re right, you can’t risk it. You don’t know what Rey wanted to do, you don’t know who he was or whatever he was carrying. You made the call. As long as you make a decision you’re doing something right, even if it turns out to be the wrong decision. The wrong decision is better than no decision.”

Makado nods after a moment. “Yeah,” she says. She’s looking out in the same direction I am but I can tell from the way she’s staring off across the dusty plains that whatever she sees out there lives mostly inside her head.

“Now, to be fair, I don’t know how I’d live with myself afterwards, but in the moment I’d still make the same call.”

Her eye flicks over to me and then her lips split in a slow lazy smile. “Well aren’t you just a ray of fucking sunshine.”

I grin back, nod to the car. “You’re really not going to call the cops on her?”

“What’s the damn point? She’ll be out of the county by now. Tell you what, do you know her phone number?”

I start to say I don’t, but then I think about it and lead Makado back into the motel room, fiddle with the room phone until I can find a call history. “There,” I say, pointing to one entry. “That’s her. She called me about three days ago, before I came to the Pit. Told me not to go.”

Makado nods, takes her phone out, punches the number in. It rings and rings and then goes to voicemail. “Erica,” she says, once the tinny beep sounds, “this is Makado Veret. Look, I’m not calling the cops on you. I know you probably don’t believe me but as far as I’m concerned this is no harm no foul, alright?”

Her eyes meet mine. “Roan’s told me about your guy in the Pit. You probably can’t reach him by phone but if you do get ahold of him, tell him to head to the main gullet and up to the monitoring station. I can’t promise immunity but I’d rather get him out of there alive than dead, and I swear to you I will try to get him off property without any federal charges. Call me back.” She rattles off her number and then hangs up, blows a breath out.

“Think she’ll call you?”

“Maybe,” Makado shrugs. She reaches into her pocket, pulls the revolver out, examines it. “Free gun, though, if she doesn’t.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

“That was a _joke_ ,” she explains, and when I start giggling I can’t suppress it even though as far as jokes go that was fairly lame, but I realize that it’s just all the adrenaline from the fight flooding out of me belatedly in one long relieved flow and even as Makado cuffs me playfully behind the ears and tells me it wasn’t _that_ funny, I manage to make her smile, and I suppose that ought to be enough.

When we get back, charger and a couple of extra half-full SD cards tucked carefully into my pocket, Elena is the only one who noticed that I’d been gone for long, but when she asks where I’ve been, rolling over on her stomach to peer at me from her messy cot, I just shrug. “Out,” I tell her, and content myself with a mysterious smile while she shakes her head and returns to her magazine, muttering something about _fucking admin_ under her breath, but it’s with a crooked smile that I know is meant for me, and when I flop onto the cot next to her nobody gives me a second glance and I feel, for just a moment, like I am starting to belong.


	3. Chapter 3

“You okay, kid?” Klaus asks, nudging me in the ribs, and I swallow hard before I think about answering. I can’t tear my eyes away from the mouth yawning in a bed of concrete before me.

I blink, keep my eyes shut. I hear Klaus shifting next to me, the plates in his excursion suit running over each other with a soft, subtle grinding sound. Mine are pinching just above my ass, and when I told the engineer-cum-tailor fitting me he’d shrugged apologetically and explained that this was as good as it was going to get, that they don’t make them slim enough to fit me properly and if he took out too many plates there wouldn’t be enough protection.

Which begged the question, of course, of protection from _what_ , but there are some questions I still dare not ask, questions that even someone from Admin would know the answers to. Peter and Makado’s stories have been colorful but they haven’t been comprehensive guides.

“Hey, kid –“

“Who’re you calling kid?” I growl, and he laughs.

“That’s more like it. This is your first time, right?”

“Quiet back there,” the Sergeant snaps, and Klaus and I share a weary glance before we fall silent again.

There’s ten of us all told – eleven if you count the robot. There’s Peter and myself, obviously; Elena and Ellis and Fumi (short, I learned last night at the party, for Fumihiro), compact, sinewy Klaus and big, barrel-chested Crookshank; tall blond pretty-boy bastard Slate, who I’d seen playing darts that first night and who’d kept shooting me lingering gazes and sly grins last night until I pretended to be drunker than I really was and made sure I stared right at him while I settled in to Elena’s lap and subtly ground myself against her thigh while she ran her nails up and down my back, a little too inebriated to realize exactly what I was doing. He grinned at me then, only a little lasciviously, and went off to bother someone else. I realized only with hindsight that it must have seemed like a come-on rather than anything else. Then there’s Max Euler, equally slimy but in a nerdier, more harmless sort of way.

And then there’s the Sergeant.

He broke up the party last night, storming into the barracks and snapping the lights on, sending bright multicolored winces flooding into our collective eyes, smacking the needle off of Fumi’s record player and making the shaggy cartographer groan. “We have an operation tomorrow, gentlemen,” he’d barked, staring around at us, a sneer curling his monkey-like lips. “I want each and every one of you to be alert! If I hear one complaint about a hangover, it’ll be –“

And so on. His voice was low and gravelly and contemptuous, his eyes were like burning coals, the veins in his corded arms stood out like a caricature you might find on the cover of a heavy metal album, and generally speaking he was the most ridiculous and contemptible figure of a man I’d ever ran into. He bawled us out for a solid ten minutes before finally flicking his gimlet eyes over each of us before settling on me. “ _Miss_ Merriweather,” he’d said, spitting the word ‘miss’ at me as though it was a personal affront to him that I had no rank to offer, “a word outside if you please. The rest of you, I want lights off and everyone asleep in ten minutes!”

I untangled myself from Elena as languidly as possible and traipsed after him, watching as the tall, lanky woman rose and tried to compose herself. I blew a kiss at her but I don’t know if she saw.

Outside the barracks the cool night air was like a slap in the face. It did a little to sober me up but in truth I didn’t need it; I hadn’t drank very much anyway. The taste of alcohol never agreed with me, and the notion of _not_ tasting the alcohol bothered me in other ways.

“Miss Merriweather,” the Sergeant said to me, turning around like a mountain might turn. “It is my intense _dis_ pleasure to welcome you to my squad. I have been _instructed_ ,” he said, blowing out a harsh breath to indicate his sheer resentment at the gall of (I would assume) Makado to _instruct_ him to do anything, “that you will be accompanying us into the Pit tomorrow. I want to make it very clear to you that –“

“Stay out of the way and don’t be a hassle, I’d assume?” I asked, my voice a little rough. He struck me as the sort of man who isn’t accustomed to being interrupted and I could see the muscles at the base of his jaw bulge as he clenched his teeth together.

“If you aren’t going to take this seriously,” he started, but I cut him off again.

“Don’t give me that shit, _sir,_ ” I say, voice heavy with irony. The alcohol made me ebullient; if I had been sober I wouldn’t have dared. “I might not have been down in the Pit before but I am far from useless. And I know for a fact you’ve got no weight to hold over me. I’m in Admin,” I said, praying that the words coming out of my mouth are close enough to the truth, praying that I’m not pushing this meatpile of a man hard enough that he’s going to snap and strike me, “you’re in Sec. Don’t treat me like shit and I’m not going to give you any trouble down there.”

He loomed over me for a moment and for a terrifying instant I thought I might have misjudged his restraint, but I matched his gaze and after a moment something in those dark eyes softened minutely. He gave me a curt nod and turned to stalk away into the night, into the other barracks where, presumably, his quarters were. “We’re on the same team, Merriweather,” he tossed over his shoulder at me, and I gave his retreating back the finger, but I didn’t put much heart in it.

I stood out there in the cool air for a while longer and then I sat on the wooden steps and rested my chin in my hands, rested my elbows on my knees, compressed myself and relaxed myself. The door opened behind me and I scooted to the side to let whoever it was go by, but instead they sat heavily on the step next to me, and I saw Elena, still looking fairly smashed, giving me a coy little smile, and though I tried hard I wasn’t able to stop myself from grinning back at her. “Hey,” I said, and she said ‘hey’ back and then for a moment neither of us had anything to say to each other, and after only a second or so of hesitation she leaned over and rested her soft blonde head on my shoulder and I could smell the alcohol but it didn’t seem so bad.

“I couldn’t find you,” Elena murmured to me, and a part of me wanted very much to lean over and kiss the top of her head, turned as it was to me, but something about it didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel as though I had earned that. “I was running around in there looking all over for you until I remembered that Sarge had dragged you out here.”

“Is he always so…”

Elena laughed. “So much of an asshole?”

“Mm,” I grunted. “I guess.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Why?” I asked her. She frowned at me.

“Why what?”

“ _Why_ is he an asshole? If he’s supposed to be your leader –“

“Ah,” she said, waggling her finger at me. “There’s history you don’t know.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. See, he was gunning for Veret’s position when the last guy in charge of Sec retired. But Veret ended up getting it because, and get this, HR has a quota for legacy employees for some fucking reason. You know anything about that?”

I shook my head, kept cool. “I haven’t heard of it.”

“It doesn’t come up very often. Basically if you were around for the disaster and you’re trying to get promoted you get preference over people who weren’t.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Huh,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s weird, right?”

“Well, I’ve never heard of any other company that does that kind of thing.”

“Me neither.”

We lapsed into another cozy silence. I looked over at her after a moment. “Is the Coast Guard part of the military?”

Elena looked up at me with a tiny smirk on her lips. With difficulty I dragged my gaze away from them and returned it to her eyes. “Yes, it is,” she said.

I blew my breath out, a quiet little laugh, and then greatly daring reached over and smoothed her hair out of her eyes. I savored the softness of it on my fingers and then let my hand fall.

“Are you nervous?” I asked her. She shook her head, putting the hair right back in her eyes again.

“Nah,” she said, but her words had a bluster to them that I wasn’t quite able to believe. “Are you?”

“I’m terrified.”

She blinked, looked at me a little more lucidly. “Hey,” she starts, “are you - ?”

I didn’t know where she was going with that until she reached up to my face very gently and wiped a tear away from my cheek and then my cheeks were burning and I blinked the tears from my eyes, furious with myself, and she could see something of it in my eyes for she put her arms out and caught me when I tried to get up and her arms were strong and I let her hold me even though I felt ashamed. I looked away from her for a long while but she put an arm back and brought herself more upright, leaning away from me a little. When I snuck a glance at her I saw her staring right at me and looked away quickly.

At least she looked more concerned than uncomfortable. She asked me what I was crying for and I told her nothing, and then she asked me if I was scared I’d get hurt down in the Pit and I said that I supposed I was but that wasn’t why I was crying. Then she laughed at me and asked why the hell I was crying then but not in an unkind way, and I looked at her then, really looked at her, until she started to shrink away from me and wonder what I was looking at, and then I said that I was crying because I hated that I’d met her when I’d met her and not earlier in my life. This was only partly true but it was good enough. She didn’t understand because of course when you tell someone something like that they won’t understand what you really mean, because you can’t tell them what you really mean, it isn’t possible. Even if you really try to show your soul to someone they won’t be able to see it.

I wanted to kiss Elena then, and I think she knew it, because the next thing she said to me was that she’d never been with a girl before, and I’d laughed at that because it’d meant that neither of us had, and the situation suddenly became so ridiculous to me that I couldn’t help but laugh, but she thought I was laughing at her, and she almost got up and left, sulked away into the barracks, before I clambered after her and caught her sleeve. I spun her around and put my arms around her waist and pressed her back against the hard wooden door and then I kissed her, and her lips were warm and firm and soft and it was not at all like kissing a man, not at all like it. She put her hands on me, hesitantly at first, roaming downwards from where she’d rested them while I’d kissed her, her eyes staring into mine with urgent intensity, and when she grabbed my ass and squeezed as though it belonged to her I made a soft little noise in my throat that only encouraged her. My heart was beating like it was going to fly away and I could feel myself panting with the heat of my want for her, but I somehow managed to push her away.

“We can’t,” I’d said, looking around, feeling suddenly exposed there in the light above the door, the whole of the world at my back. “Not now.”

Elena had sighed exasperatedly and gave my ass a light slap that sent goosebumps racing down my legs before she tugged me away and around the side of the barracks, staggering with me because neither of us could wait to kiss each other again, and then I had put my hand up her shirt and under her sports bra and she had put hers down my sweatpants and we clutched at each other desperately there in the dark until finally I had cried out softly in the night. Once I had composed myself I kissed my way down her stomach, tugging down her leggings as I went, and then she knit her hands into my hair and held me to her until she bucked against my lips, and then we went back in and fell asleep in our cots, and though I ached to hold her it was enough to be able to look over at her in the cot next to mine and see the way she smiled to herself, eyes shut and peaceful.

There she goes, waving at the rest of us in an ironic salute through the small plated windows of the gondola car. Her eyes linger on me and I smile at her through the window, but before I can see if she smiles back the sunlight strikes the glass at an oblique angle and I no longer can see her.

Six at a time can fit, so it’s just us left - me, Euler, the Sergeant, Klaus, and the robot, which Euler has informed us all is named Joker. It’s a pun, he says, of some kind, but it only makes sense in German so he doesn’t share it with us.

Should I feel more strongly about it? I felt a wrenching in me when the Sergeant had gestured and Elena’s hand had slipped from mine, down near our waists, fingers intertwined surreptitiously, but last night it hadn’t felt like a threshold crossed or a turning point. Should it have?

We hadn’t spoken of it. Elena had grabbed my ass when we passed coming out of the shower and I had thrown caution to the wind, the cramped stalls being empty and no footsteps echoing down the tiled hall to the left, and I had grabbed her and tugged her into one of the shower stalls and kissed her there, pressed her against the wall, craning my neck upwards to meet her lips with mine, and she only pushed me away from her when I had bent my head to her breast and started to kiss her there as well, her voice a little shaky, her breath a little heavy, telling me that we had to go, that someone would walk in any moment. Then I’d grinned at her and sashayed out of the stall, putting a bit more lascivious of a roll to my hips than I usually do, feeling her eyes fixed on my buttocks like they’d been glued there, and then I’d wrapped the towel around myself and gone and gotten dressed with a smile resting in my heart.

I got a glimpse of myself in the mirror and stopped; the girl behind the glass stared out at me and for a moment I didn’t recognize her. Too happy.

But when am I going to tell –

“Alright, you lot. The robot – er, Joker,” the Sergeant barks, glaring at Euler, “is heavy enough that it’ll need to go down by itself. Mister Euler,” he says, “if you wouldn’t mind walking Joker into this next gondola?”

“Oh, no, Sergeant,” Euler says with an apologetic smile that’s almost a smirk. “That’s not going to do. I’ll have to ride down with him.”

“And why is that?”

“This little remote,” Euler says, waggling it, “won’t reach all the way down there from the surface. It’s a good signal but not that good. I’ll need to ride down as well, to make sure there’s a constant connection.”

“Why the hell is that so important?” The Sergeant asks. “Can’t you shut it down for the trip or something?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind waiting about two hours for me to boot him up again once we get down there.”

“Gentlemen,” I say after a moment, glancing between them. “I only weigh about a hundred and forty-five pounds, even with this suit and all my equipment. Give me the remote, I’ll ride down with Joker, and the rest of you can take the next gondola. That won’t go over the weight limit, will it?”

“It’ll be close,” the technician at the controls over on the left says, looking over. “You said Joker weighs two-hundred twenty-seven kilos?”

“That’s correct,” Euler says, staring at me. The technician nods.

“That’s the best bet, then,” he says. “Even Specialist Herrera here,” he nods to Klaus, “weighs almost two hundred pounds with his suit and his rifle.”

“Well, Euler, how about it?” the Sergeant asks. “We’re burning daylight.”

“I really don’t think that –“ he starts, but the Sergeant gives him a disgusted grunt and snatches the remote from Euler’s hands, shoves it into mine.

“She’s a smart girl, aren’t you, Merriweather? She won’t break your toy, Euler,” he says. “Now show her how to work the damn thing and let’s get moving.”

Euler blows out a little defeated breath and squeezes past Klaus, comes behind me. He smells odd; not unpleasant, but odd.

“Let me show you,” he says. He puts his hand on the joystick and holds down a small green button simultaneously, presses the stick forwards with his thumb; Joker rises from its squatting haunch and stalks forward into the gondola, which creaks under the machine’s weight but still holds. “This button,” he says, pointing to a red one with a curious latch mechanism built around it, “is the safety for the remote. I’m putting it on now,” he says, flicking the latch over the button and pressing it down until it snaps into place with a tiny click. “And you can do whatever you want with all these buttons and nothing will happen,” he says, pressing the joystick four different directions in rapid succession. Joker doesn’t move a mechanical muscle. “Whatever you do,” he tells me, “don’t undo that latch.”

“Sure,” I tell him. Experimentally, I press a couple of the buttons myself; they have that oily feel to them that you sometimes get with very high-quality plastic, like my fingers are gliding over them.

“I’m serious,” he warns me. “Don’t undo the latch.”

“Yeah, I get it.” I pick up my pack and press into the gondola. I have to duck under Joker’s armpit but after that I have plenty of space in the back. I look back outwards and see Klaus flash me a grin and a quick thumbs-up before the Sergeant reaches up and seals the door in, and then it’s just me and Joker against the world, it seems. We hang there suspended for a moment before there’s a grinding noise and the gondola jerks to life and sends us slowly plunging into the Pit’s moist flesh.

Joker smells like machine oil and electricity, but he hulks there inert. I reach out after a while and put my hand on him; he makes little noise, a small hum and, I noticed before, a soft whine of servos whenever he moves. But sitting still like this? He’s practically silent. I can feel no vibrations rattling his metal hull, but when I press down harder, rest the bone of my palm against him, then I can feel it, a low subsonic buzz jostling my bones.

I’m avoiding the issue. I turn around, force myself to peer out the gondola’s window, and a fist seizes my heart and forces it up into my throat. My head had been throbbing just looking at the orifice but being inside it is worse. I feel queasy and squeeze my eyes shut and that helps a little, but then the gondola jostles to the left and outside there’s a click as a series of floodlights slam to life and I can see the wet pink lightly writhing surroundings in altogether too much detail.

I’m sure it wasn’t designed that way, but the concrete exclusion plate is good enough to be a work of art. The stark, slatey white, boiling in the sun, throwing up heat so intense that the walkway down to it is shielded both from above and below by heavy canvas, the minute variegated cracks and imperfections like canyons and canals in the moon. As you walk you can see out the sides of the suspended walkway and you can always see the perfectly round aperture ahead of you, the tubes and machinery clustering around it like congeries of bubbles in seafoam spray, but you can’t see down inside of it until you get just above it, the concrete is thick enough that the angle has to be very close.

Then you get above it and you look down and you see down through the concrete and you look down the throat of the Pit, you see the pink, healthy-looking edge of the skin beneath the concrete, pink as anything, a soft brown of a tan towards the inmost edges where it gets no shade, you see the metal flanges and hydraulic system that they use to feed the thing its medicine, keep it asleep, keep it soothed and sedated, but when you force yourself to look at the center of it you can see for imagined and terrifying miles down into the center of the earth, pure black like the Pit were sucking the light out of the sky, and all the pipes and tubes and the chain system and rigging and scaffold for the gondolas are all vanishing down there into darkness.

If I had something better than my cheap, crappy back-up SLR, if I had the time to set up a shot instead of someone jarring against my back while I tried to crane my neck over the side and stare down into it, I might have, for the first time in my career as a photographer, taken a photo that could have begun to approach art.

Maybe I’ll ask Makado if I can come back and take one, when this is all over.

I laugh to myself, standing there quietly, observing the rivulets of blood and pus and mucus dotting the windows, leaning up against Joker’s inert form, watching the raw, wet inside of the Pit’s throat slide by outside. I think I’ve mastered myself by now, I don’t think I’ll be losing my scant breakfast on the floor, but it was a near thing for a moment.

“Christ,” I say out loud. “This is a fine fucking mess I’m in, isn’t it, Joker?”

Joker doesn’t respond. I reach out and knock gently on that metal carapace but he doesn’t rise to my occasion, he’s too dignified for that. I heft the remote softly in my hand, feel the lightness of it. Wonder, momentarily, what happens if the remote gets lost or broken, down there below us in the Pit.

The lights inside the gondola flicker and then go out entirely, and then the gondola cranks to a halt, swaying lightly from side to side with misplaced momentum. I swallow hard and fumble with the radio at my hip, but before I can get it out of the holster it squawks at me and I jump.

“Roan?” a voice asks. “It’s Makado.” Her voice is grainy and distorted enough that I can barely make out that it’s her, but as soon as I hear it a flood of relief washes through me.

“Mak,” I breathe, then clear my throat, repeat myself a little louder. “Mak, I’m okay. The lights are out and the gondola’s stopped moving, what’s going on?”

When she clicks the radio back on I think I can hear yelling in the background. “Everything’s fine,” she says. “Electrical fault, this happens sometimes.”

“Uh…what’s going on in the background there?”

“Oh,” Makado laughs. “That’s Euler and the Sergeant bawling each other out. Euler is a little upset that he couldn’t ride down with Joker and now that this damn thing’s shorted out again he’s terrified that something’s going to happen to his precious robot.”

“I see.”

“Yeah. I just noticed that nobody was very concerned with your wellbeing so I thought I’d just radio down and let you know we’re working on it, so just sit tight.”

“Thank you.”

“You alright?” she asks again, maybe noticing something in my voice, but I nod firmly even though she can’t see it.

“I’m fine,” I say, “just a little surprised is all. Thanks for the concern.”

Makado signs off and then I’m left alone with my thoughts. And with Joker, obviously, but he isn’t doing much to take my mind off things.

Will ballast fluid do anything? How much of it should I drink? I’d asked a couple of surreptitious questions but all that Ellis and Elena had told me was that it could cure some diseases, yes, but HIV specifically? Who knows. They’d never tried. That it wasn’t a panacea, that there were limitations. That the scientists never could figure out exactly _why_ it cured things, just that it did. That if you synthesized it in a lab it wouldn’t but if you took it out of the Pit it did.

I can keep butting my head into it for as long as I like but at the end of the day the fact of the matter is that I’m not going to know until I try, until I sneak out of the goddam tent and slurp up some of that ballast fluid (my stomach revolts even thinking of it but I can do it, I know I can do it, I can _make_ myself -) and then get back without anyone noticing. What other choice do I have?

Well, to not drink it. To just let…whatever happens happen. I don’t have AIDS, not yet. And though HIV turns into AIDS I think it can take a long time sometimes. But that would require me to acknowledge that maybe I overreacted, maybe I…

Maybe the knowledge that I was going to die, no matter how artificial and caveated that knowledge was, made me feel like I had a purpose. Maybe that’s what I’m chasing, feeling that purpose.

Maybe –

There is a crunching whine of motors and servos and I turn very slowly to see Joker moving. His metallic, articulated hand is trembling and then as I watch it clenches into a fist. I can hear a small creak of stressed metal coming from it and I snap a glance down at the remote in my hand, wondering if I’ve pressed something on accident, but no, the lock is still very firmly in place.

Then the lights come back on and the gondola jostles back into life and we resume our downwards course. Joker’s fist is unclenched now, open as it was before, and I wonder whether or not I imagined it, whether it was all just in my head.

The radio crackles into life again and again I jump, and hardly daring to take my eyes off of Joker I reach down and toggle it. “Hey,” I say, a little shakily.

“Hi,” Makado says. “You should be moving again.”

“Yeah, we are.”

“We?”

“You know. Me and Joker. Uh, can you get Euler on the line?”

“No, he’s sulking.”

“Wonderful,” I murmur.

“What was that? I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Nothing, it’s fine. About how much longer until I’m down there?”

“About ten minutes. Not claustrophobic, are you?”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Was it something about the robot? I can grab Euler for you if you really want me to, but –“

“Um. No,” I say after a moment, “no, it’s nothing.”

A pause. “Are you sure?” Makado asks dubiously, and I groan to myself before I hit the button and answer.

“I’m fine, Makado,” I tell her. “Just a little spooked, that’s all. I’m fine.”

“Alright,” she says. “Hang in there, just a little longer.”

It really is only a little longer, and though I can’t bring myself to take my eyes off Joker for the rest of the ride down, he stays reassuringly still, and once the gondola hisses to a stop and Ellis throws the door open for me I even have enough confidence to step outwards and onto the squelching, wet, fleshy ground. Ellis is saying something to me but I can scarcely hear him; I am far, far too busy drinking in my surroundings with a mixture of horror and wonder.

The gondola opens out onto a small staging area atop the control center in the main gullet. There’s a balcony and a guardrail but other than that we’re exposed to the metaphorical elements. It looks as though everyone else has already taken the stairs down inside to the station; I can hear laughter and voices through the open hatch. Ellis and Fumi have stayed up here on the balcony, though.

It’s darker than I’d expected, for some reason. I guess all of the little informational diagrams and pamphlets always portrayed the Pit’s innards like they were properly lit, but it’s _dark_ , and even though floodlights are dotted around the worn metal rim of the station here and there the pale cones they cast onto the ribbed innards of the gullet are entirely inadequate for getting a sense of the sheer _scale_ of the place. The station is anchored to the sides by long outrigging pylons, recessed and greased. I can see where the hydraulics would activate and brace it if the Pit ever did decide to choke again, I can see the broad flat plates where they press against the throat, red and irritated-looking. There’s someone out there in a suit and a helmet, rigged to one of the pylons with a carabiner, a little maintenance car in the track slung below it, doing something with a tube and a wrench.

It’s quieter, too, than I thought it would be. I guess I’d assumed that there’d be an assortment of creaks and groans and squelches, various small organic noises, loud moans and roars and screeches, but it’s just like being inside a cave, with little unnameable and unplaceable drips and drops and soft wet sounds.

It smells fecund in here, not a terrible smell but one that is so overwhelmingly cloying and wet and organic that I find myself swallowing hard to try and keep my gorge from rising in response to the sudden thickness of the air. Ellis claps me on the back and I hunch over, hands on my knees, and just squeeze my eyes shut and focus on my breathing for a moment. “She alright?” I hear Fumi ask, and I nod as best I can, throw up a thumbs up, but it peters out after a moment as I can feel a cold sweat breaking out all along my back. I lean backwards and sit heavily, there on the roof of the station, and Ellis laughs.

“Shit, Fumi,” he says. “First time’s always the worst, huh?”

“Jesus Christ,” I groan. “How do you people breathe down here?”

“You get used to it.”

I stagger to my feet, dust myself off a little. Fumi’s right, you do get used to it after a while, and as long as I refrain from focusing on it…

“You want to get Joker out of there?” Ellis asks, and I nod.

“Right,” I say, and after a minimum of fiddling with the remote I manage to make him walk out of the gondola, and then Ellis slaps the return button and the creak of the chain starts again. We wait there another fifteen or twenty minutes or so until the last car arrives, Klaus and the Sergeant and Euler crowded together, Euler and the Sergeant still glaring daggers at each other. I see it hit Euler just the same as it hit me, and he spends a moment gawking around at his surroundings in wonder before I hand him back the remote and he spends a hurried five minutes or so inspecting Joker before he sweeps his thumb over the joystick and sends the machine marching forward and down the stairs with far greater skill than I’d ever be able to muster. The Sergeant gives me a look and ushers us forwards, and then we head downwards into the station.

‘Cluttered’ doesn’t even begin to describe the place. There is computer equipment, magazines, newspapers, takeout boxes, all clustered like mushrooms growing around the racks and racks of high-tech monitors and workstations. There’s a folding table and chairs set up in the back with what looks like a half-finished game of Risk laid out on it, there’s an ancient cathode-ray TV set on a shelf playing an old western movie that I don’t recognize. The guys who work there, all nerd-types with glasses (one even has a pocket protector and I have to stop myself from grinning at him) are all gathered around Joker fawning over him like he’s a sports car until Euler waves them away, but he does so indulgently, making the robot give them rude hand gestures until the Sergeant snaps at him and then ushers the rest of us through a door and into a much neater and cleaner meeting room in the back. He speaks brusquely to one of the nerds who’d followed us in and gets the slight man to rummage around in a cabinet until he pulls out a map of the Pit and unfolds it, laying it flat on the table.

“Alright,” the Sergeant says. “Everyone gather around. Now we,” he says, giving us all a significant glance, his eyes lingering on me and Euler, “are right here, at the Control Center in the main gullet.”

I crane my neck and peer at the map. It seems like the place he’s pointing is distressingly high up and for a brief moment I wonder what the scale on this map is before the Sergeant drags his meaty paw downwards to a spot that seems equally awfully far below us. “This is the sealed entrance to the copepod barrows. That’s where we’re headed. We can’t take an IAV, we’d need at least three of them in order to carry all of us plus Joker, so we’ll have to leg it. I don’t want to let those bastards know we’re coming.”

A couple of nods, grunts of agreement, and so on.

“We’ll be making our way down the old ruined organ trail,” the Sergeant says, tracing his finger down from the Control Center, “to here, which is close to a cluster of ballast bulbs, to make camp later tonight. Yes, I know, ordinarily we’ve got standing orders to steer clear of bulbs, so as not to get into any more fights with the wildlife than we have to, but the reports we’ve been getting are that there haven’t been anything particularly dangerous in those vents in the past month or so, and if we wanted to make camp someplace else it’d have to be up _here_ ,” he says, thumping his thumb down on a different spot, “which would mean we’d have to detour another three hours out of our way, so we’re going to just stick to camping near the bulbs.”

“From there,” he continues, “tomorrow we’ll make our way over to the Cord and take that down to _here_ , and rendezvous with the research team in the Deep Listening Station in Oyster’s Shame, where, I have been informed, they have an important piece of equipment for us to use once we get to the barrows. We’ll stay there tomorrow night, and then the next day we’ll get to the barrows, grab the crystal, and hightail it out of there without taking in too much of the scenery. Capisce?”

I nearly burst out laughing but manage to turn it into a hacking cough. Elena pounds me on the back for a moment and though I almost go down on my knees from the force of it it gives me enough time to compose myself. “Capisce,” I say weakly, and there are a few more enthusiastic grunts of assent from the rest of the squad. Then we’re moving, down flights and flights of stairs, smell like mildew and wet paint, down to a staging area and then grouping up before a wide shutter-style garage door. One of the sleek elongated Interior Anatomy Vehicles, the IAVs, glowers at us in the dark behind. Everyone’s getting ready; I see Elena slip her helmet on and fiddle with her headlamp, I see Crookshank and Klaus check their rifles and their sidearms, I see the Sergeant double-checking everyone. It takes me a moment to get my helmet hooked on properly but once I do I raise the visor and feel a little more secure with it cradling my head tightly on all sides. I’m sure it’ll end up giving me a headache after a while but for the moment it’s nice.

“Miss Merriweather,” the Sergeant barks, turning around and glaring at me. “Have you got that camera ready?”

I hold it up and waggle it at him. “Say cheese, _Sarge_ ,” I say. I hear a few chuckles but he glares daggers at the rest of the team and they quiet quickly.

“Alright,” he says. “Let’s move.”

He hits the switch and the doors hiss open behind him, loud mechanical rattling filling the air until they come to a clanging rest in their recessed grooves in the sides of the bay. And then, for the second time today, I let the Pit swallow me whole.


	4. Chapter 4

“Take a break!” comes the barked command through the squad radio link, and it takes all of my willpower not to collapse onto the fleshy ground then and there. I take the camera slung around my neck and turn it off, telescope the lens back into itself, and then find a nice soft bit of wall to sink into before I pop the helmet and give Elena a weary gaze. She grins at me cheekily.

“How you doing?”

“God,” I tell her. “I had no idea there was going to be this much hiking.”

I had never thought of myself as much of a slouch as far as physical activity went. I liked keeping myself fit, liked the rush I got after a workout. I did a lot of cardio, a lot of jogging, that kind of thing. Occasionally I’d lift some weights but it didn’t appeal to me as much as just the inchoate joy of moving quickly and feeling air push in and out of my lungs. I had a fair amount of endurance as well; I wasn’t running marathons or anything but frequently I’d end up jogging for upwards of an hour, just for something to do, just to unwind after work or take my mind off something. I’d looked at the several miles we’d have to travel today, down there in the stinking guts of the Pit, and thought something along the lines of ‘no sweat, I’m active, I take care of myself, it’ll be a workout but nothing more.’

Christ.

What neither Peter or Makado had mentioned to me is that if you aren’t travelling in a Made Place down here, in a place that’s been specifically sanitized and reinforced and structured for something the size of a human to get around comfortably, it is capital-letter Tough Going. Everything down here, down to just the texture of the gigantic veins we pushed through, our suits sopping with nameless excretions and juices, seemed designed to only sullenly give way to us, and that after a great deal on our part to convince it to do so.

Example number one – the tightness of some of the veins is so great that we had to use something called a venterial jack, a pneumatic, hydraulic device that Slate carried slung over his back, in order to force them open so we could pass through. Everyone kept saying that once we hit the organ trail it’d be more open and we wouldn’t have to use it, but in the meantime in some of these conduits Slate would have to get three or four of us to help him pull back the weird, spongy tissue of the sides back far enough for him to plant it there in the middle, and then we’d all back away, and with a thundering sound like a pile-driver it would expand and splay open, pushing the tissue back with such force that at times it would leave a gigantic bruise coloring the Pit’s peach-hued flesh afterwards, and then we’d be able to crawl past it in the newly expanded space perhaps twenty feet or so before we’d have to hit the small trigger on its hull to collapse it, and then lug the thing back up to the front and repeat the process.

Example two – these vents aren’t perfectly straight, flat areas to walk in. They dip and bend and curve; sometimes they roll upwards, great creased crinkles of flesh stretching upwards into a ninety-degree angle. Then there’s nothing to do but get over it somehow, either by pulling yourself up if it’s small enough, or by breaking out the damn rope and pitons and climbing up, and then helping everyone else up after you. Then imagine doing all of this in pitch darkness, the only light coming from everyone’s headlamps. Then imagine that the floor is damp and sticky and squishy and generally revolting. Slippery with fluid at times. Imagine that it groans and writhes and wriggles around you if you manage to unstick your cleats at the wrong time and it bucks and pitches you to the ground. And then imagine that if you do fall to the ground, in the space of time it takes for someone to come and help you up you become covered with all forms of parasites, tiny things ranging between the size of a knuckle and the size of a fist, all urgently eager and hungry. Tiny worms like nematodes, crablike mites, stranger, less defined things that scuttle or slither or undulate off at the first sign of motion but are altogether too eager to swarm over you and excrete digestive juices or sensory pheromones or urine or shit or what the hell ever else.

I ask Elena about them and she explains that the duct that we’re moving through is part of the Pit’s digestive system and that all of these little creatures snag scraps of food whenever it passes through, or sometimes they prey on each other. They evolve quickly, down here in the dark, generations zipping by in the course of a day.

I can see my helmeted reflection in the glossy visor of Elena’s helmet and I shudder. My camera is already splattered with grime, no matter how careful I’ve been to keep it clean. Nothing that interferes with its operation, thankfully; I don’t relish the idea of grappling with the clunky, low-resolution camcorder secreted somewhere in its case in my pack. At least the operation of my SLR is second-nature to me; at least I don’t have to think about it.

Peter stomps over and sits down next to us. In here, in these wider basins, the little scummy creatures crawling all over don’t seem to venture into the middle, leaving a broad round circle of bare flesh where we can sit without being molested. I’ve already popped my helmet and I keep my eyes on Elena as she takes hers off, shakes her head doggedly, smooths her hair out. She catches my eye and grins, and then flicks her eyes over to Peter.

“Peter, right?”

“Yes,” he says. He holds his fist out and they touch knuckles. A less complicated gesture than trying to shake hands with the suit gloves on. “Sorry I haven’t been around much, I’ve been –“

“Too busy with Veret?” Elena interjects smoothly, and I nearly choke on the mouthful of water I’d taken from my canteen. Peter claps me on the back and grimaces.

“I hoped people wouldn’t have talked much,” Peter says, and Elena laughs.

“Please,” she says. “People are going to do nothing _but_ talk if you’re fucking the boss. I’m Elena, by the way.”

Peter’s blushing. I nudge him. “So you and Makado, huh?”

He snorts. “Slate walked in on me and her, um. Well, you know. In one of the supply closets the other day.”

“And of course,” Elena adds, “considering that Slate is a 12-year-old girl, he ran and tattled to everyone.”

“That’s Slate,” Peter agrees. “When did you join?”

“Three years ago.”

“Huh. That’s back when I was here.”

“Yeah, I was attached to a research team for a while. They were doing some gastric stuff and they needed a diver. Probably why we never met.”

“Makes sense,” Peter nods. Elena’s eyes flick over to me and she reaches out a hand.

“Want me to open that for you?” she asks, and I shake my head. I’ve almost gotten the granola bar open now, but these damn gloves –

“I’ve got it,” I tell her. “I almost –“

“You sure you’ve got it?”

“Shut up, Pete.”

“Here, let me –“

“Fine,” I say, tossing the granola bar to Elena. She strips the wrapper off it with one deft motion and I shake my head. “How the hell –“

“Lots of practice,” Peter says. “So Elena, when you joined, did you…”

As I sit there munching and letting the quiet rustle of conversation blur into the background, letting some of the strength come back into my weary legs, I think for a moment about the fleshy, veined interior of the basin I’m sitting in. There are places in my body just like this, I think to myself. This is just the same as me, writ large. And I’m sure I have parasites just like those squirming things, all the mites and leeches and worms and other tiny things, just even tinier, single-celled or at the very least simple organisms, living inside of me, just like these are.

I put my hand on the floor hesitantly and I swear I feel, just for a moment, the throb of a titan heartbeat somewhere resounding in it like the echo of a vast drum.

“Alright people! Let’s get moving!”

I push myself up, nearly bang heads with Elena. Our helmets are off still so it’s dark, the lights are strobing all around as everyone puts theirs on. “Sorry,” I say to her, but before I can get the word out fully she’s seized me by the shoulders and kissed me hard and deep on the lips, her tongue skating over my teeth lightly before we part, her gleaming grin the only part of her I can really see, and I’m left breathless. For the next fifteen minutes of hiking at least I can’t seem to wipe the smile from my face.

* * *

The first difficulty arises only about an hour after we left the rest site. The vent we were passing through widened out, a sign Elena explained meant that we were beginning to enter the old Organ Trail, sort of a central hiking path through some of the more interesting areas of the Pit. It meant easier going, which I was thankful for; the area had been cleared and levelled a long time ago, back before 2007, and even though some of the built areas had been wrecked by those titan convulsions, now years past, there was still a great deal of flat ground and even in some parts metal platforms and walkways for us to use, which certainly gave my aching arms and legs a little solace.

It happened just at the end of one of those walkways, a short, narrow tunnel through a conic gape of flesh that truncated down from the ceiling like an abraded sphincter. The walkway through it still had age-old hydraulic jacks keeping the fleshy ceiling from collapsing inward on it, and though the Sergeant and Fumi, up at front, showed a little trepidation at the notion of passing through with only those jacks to secure it, there was no other real option; the portable jack Slate had wasn’t strong enough to provide any sort of security, even if we set it up in the middle of the passage at full load strength. Plus, Crookshank had loudly and crudely reasoned, if the fucking thing hadn’t caved in in the last four fucking years, what are the fucking odds it’ll fuck us in the ass right as we walk under it?

Hard to argue with that logic. And, to Crookshank’s credit, the fucking thing didn’t fuck us in the ass, although I couldn’t stop myself from staring up at the bloated, swollen flesh of the ceiling as I passed under it, a tiny ice-cold trickle of fear welling in my gut as I considered the sheer weight that was likely behind that glossy, straining surface. Suit or no suit, that’d kill me.

We hardly make it thirty yards from the ending of the tunnel before Joker tears through the flesh of the trail and plunges down into darkness. Euler actually yelps and we all whip around and see the outline of the pit the robot had fallen through, an irregular craggy chasm of flesh. We make our way cautiously to its edge and peer down and I almost laughed, for there just fifteen feet or so below us is Joker, his head inclined upwards, the running lights on the side blinking anxiously, looking for all the world like a forlorn and anxious dog waiting for its master to come rescue it.

Then all manner of cursing and expletives. It was for all the world like watching the groups of construction workers you’d see sometimes on the side of the highway, about six of us standing around mutely with our arms folded or akimbo, watching, while two others ran about frantically trying to accomplish something. The Sergeant and Euler had another shouting match which ended with the Sergeant throwing up his hands in disgust when Euler explained that the damn thing weighed around five hundred pounds and that nobody had told him to look out for crevices like that. Crookshank was in favor of jumping down and tying a rope around Joker’s waist and then the rest of us hoisting him out that way, but Klaus stops him and tosses a tiny white tab down into the murky liquid pooling around Joker’s feet.

“Acid test strip,” Elena murmurs to me when I shot her a questioning glance.

Nearly a dozen headlamps focus in on the tiny floating strip. Crookshank spits a disgusted curse when it turns a violent shade of pink.

“Good thing Klaus threw that in,” Elena calls, a tiny smirk coloring her words, and Crookshank rolls his eyes at her.

“What’s going on – oops. Sorry.”

Makado’s voice had flourished in my ears, sounding as rich and full in the helmet as though she’d been standing right next to me. Then the transmission clicked off. A couple of chuckles from the rest of the squad and then I realized – she must have dialed to the wrong frequency, spoken to all of us instead of just the Sergeant. He inclines his great slab of a head, one hand pressed to his helmeted ear, nodding occasionally, and then motions to Euler. “Euler,” he says. “Can you make it dig in and climb out?”

Euler stares at him blankly. “You mean into the - ?”

“Yes, goddam it, into the side of the wall.”

Poor Euler. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to. His hands are shaking lightly on the remote and all of us staring at him waiting for him to do it probably isn’t helping. He presses a complex series of buttons, manipulates the joystick carefully, and down in the pit Joker reaches up and plunges his hands into the fleshy wall, using about as much effort, it looks like, as it’d take to push into sand. Joker lifts himself off the ground and then hesitantly pulls one hand out, dripping with gore, and reaches upwards.

“ _Today_ , Euler.”

I almost, _almost_ snap something at the Sergeant, but I bite my tongue. Whatever sort of peace we brokered the other night, it seemed like a tentative one, and I’d rather he was yelling at Euler, not me.

Sorry, Euler.

“Hey, Roan?”

I reach down to the radio and click it on. “Makado, what’s up?”

“Hi,” she says. “I just wanted to let you know that earlier today I got a call from our mutual friend Erica.”

I can feel my eyebrows raising of their own accord. “Really?” I ask. “Was she able to get in touch with - ?”

“With her guy down there? No, she wasn’t. She was calling to let me know that she was sorry,” Makado laughs, “and to tell you the same, that she’s sorry.”

“Christ,” I mutter. “Wasn’t expecting that.”

“I’ve already spoken to the Sergeant about it and we’ve decided that on the way back up you’ll make some detours, check some spots that he might be holed up, but since we can’t make contact with him…”

“Right.”

“How are you doing down there?”

“Um. I’m alright. This is a bit of a new experience for me.”

“That’s one way to put it. Getting good footage?”

Me and my camera watch as Joker pokes his head up over the lip of the crevasse. Next to me Elena gives a little whooping cheer. “Yeah,” I say, turning so that Elena’s in the shot. She looks over at me, looks down, the lens reflecting in her helmet, flashes index and middle finger in a v at me. “You could say that.”

“Good. Well, that’s all, just wanted to check in with you.”

“Heard about you and Peter,” I blurt before I can stop myself. Makado grunts questioningly, and I roll my eyes at placing my foot directly in my own mouth as usual. “You know,” I clarify, “in the supply closet.”

There’s a moment of frozen silence and then Makado bursts out laughing. “Goddam it,” she sputters. “Slate told everyone, didn’t he?”

“More or less.”

“That fucker. Well, yeah. We, ah, got a little carried away.”

“I’m happy for you,” I tell her, and I find myself mildly surprised that it’s actually true. “He’s right here if you want to talk to –“

“No, no, it’s okay, I’ve actually been talking to him all day, more or less. Cause, you know, the equipment up here, I can put a direct line in to whichever one of you I like.”

“Right, of course.”

“Well,” Makado says, and I smile softly to myself beneath the helmet.

“See you, Mak.”

“See you.”

The radio line clicks off and then I’m alone inside my own head again.

Joker is dripping with blood now and I make sure I take plenty of video of him; a couple of stills as well, just because it looks metal. Like something straight out of a movie. Then once Euler has checked him over and wiped off the worst of it we go back to trudging down the vent like nothing has happened. Euler takes more care to keep Joker walking in step behind us and though Elena points out a couple of the fissures to me, skin crawling as I examine the thin membranous layer separating them from the air, nobody falls into any more.

Another couple of hours of walking and then another break. I have to go back three menus to check the time on my camera; some of the others’ helmets, I’m told, have heads-up displays on the interior that show details like that; mine either doesn’t have this functionality or it’s switched off so as to not overwhelm me with extraneous visual noise. It’s six in the evening; Elena tells me that the plan is to make it to our stopping point for the day by nine or ten. We’re over the worst of it, she says grinning, and then because we’re towards the back with only Joker behind us to see, she reaches down and squeezes my ass lightly and I respond in the only way I know how, by upping the ante, and reaching for her and groping her taut breasts clumsily through the suit before she spins away from me laughing. I still cast a nervous glance behind and meet Joker’s faceless metal gaze. I peer at him again for a little before I turn back around. I haven’t told Euler yet of what happened in the gondola on the way down but the more I think about it and turn it over in my head the more I’m convinced it must have been nothing. Just a little software glitch of some kind.

It amazes me how easily the fantastic surroundings I’m in become mundane. Just scant hours ago I was nearly getting sick breathing the air but now I’m grateful for it when I pop my helmet and gulp down great lungfuls of it, cloying and organic and thick but not recycled, not passed through a dozen filters before reaching my lungs.

We’re in the Organ Trail proper now, great wide cavities and veins and vesicles and all these other little fiddly medical names that pass between everybody like old friends but which leave me halting. What’s the difference between a vein and a vent? A vesicle and a ventricle? What about an organ and a cavity? I don’t know, and if I asked I’d only expose my ignorance, I’d only be patronized. I did ask Elena a few innocuous questions in that nature but every time she answered me she did so with a smug little smile and it made me feel small so eventually I stopped asking, even though I know she probably didn’t mean to do it.

Break. Another granola bar, another bottle of water. Have to stay hydrated. Sergeant comes around to all of us, makes sure we’re drinking enough. He doesn’t bark at me, he’s – not kind, but not awful. I hold hands with Elena surreptitiously there in the dark and though I can barely feel her through the thick suit knowing she’s there is a comfort.

I think about Erica’s boy, whoever he was to her. There wasn’t enough of a resemblance for me to think that they were family but obviously she cares about him. I think about him alone down here for almost four days now. I think about how scared I’d be in the same position.

I have to fucking piss.

I get up and Elena eyes me. “Where’re you going?”

“To take a leak. What’s the protocol down here, just squat down and go wherever?”

She makes a face. “Unfortunately. If you’re male you have the luxury of using an empty water bottle but if not…”

“Right,” I say. I’ve gone camping before so the concept isn’t entirely foreign to me but it still isn’t particularly tasteful either. I make my way towards a discrete corner, a little fold of flesh that drapes down from the ceiling like a curtain.

“Don’t go far!” Elena calls from behind me, and I throw her a thumbs-up without turning. It’ll just take a moment anyway. Behind the curtain is actually another corridor – a vent, I guess, is the term everyone else seems to use most commonly. I eye it a little warily before I step forward. It’s dark in there, and I feel a little more exposed than I thought I would as I unzip the bottom portion of the suit and squat down, choosing a dingy little corner, a little wrinkled knot of flesh like the accordion-like joint between the thumb and the rest of the hand.

I do my business quickly and then seal the suit, taking time to check all of the joints like I was shown in the brief training the engineer fitting me had given. I –

Something moves in the vent ahead of me and I freeze. I can’t see it properly, it’s far too dark, but it seems large, larger than I am. I take a hesitant step back, eyes locked on its wavering silhouette, and then I reach down with my thumb along the side of the helmet, carried loosely at my side, and press the button for the headlamp, and it casts a beam of light over the thing, and it is so large, larger than me, towering at least eight feet tall there in the vent, all whipping tentacles and soft spongy tissue. It has wide, strange eyes that peer at me blearily in the sudden light, its long, snakelike, curiously vulnerable-looking body surrounded by a halo of pale venous fronds or tendrils, light pink and throbbing. It reaches out for me and I start to scream but the sound catches in my throat, and then I take a panicked, scrambling step backwards and the cleats dig in the wrong way and I pitch to the ground. I hit hard, knock the air from my lungs, and then I really can’t scream even though my brain has finally caught up with what’s happening and I’m trying to force my abused lungs to work, all I can manage is a little croaking noise.

The thing scuttles closer to me. The tendrils are starting to wrap around my leg and I kick at it and scoot backwards, but they tighten around my ankle and hold me still. I can feel terror inside of me like I’m a cocoon, like it’s clawing at my skin and if it makes a hole in me I’ll disappear, evaporate, vanish, I’ll scream and scream and -

“Roan?” Elena calls. It sounds as though she’s coming towards the coil of flesh I’d hidden behind. “We’re getting ready to go.”

“Help,” I manage to croak, and then Elena bolts around the corner, her pistol already clearing the holster. I feel the tendrils around my leg loosen and then slip away as she marches towards the thing completely fearlessly. She isn’t even pointing the gun at it. She stands up on her tiptoes as best she can in the bulky cleats and stares at it, stares it down, the thing retreating on its millions of whiplike tentacles, before finally it turns tail and flees down the vent, making a noise like pudding being poured into a bag full of live eels.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter as Elena helps me up. “What the fuck was that?”

“Venous shamble,” she tells me. “Big one, too. Would have stuck a proboscis in you and sucked you dry if you let it. Why didn’t you shoot it or something? They’re pussies, even if you missed it would have run away.”

“They never gave me a gun,” I say quietly, looking at her. I can feel myself trembling with the comedown of the adrenaline and I feel defensive. “They said I didn’t qualify so I never got one.”

Elena’s face falls, and then a spark of anger lights behind her eyes and I can see her clenching her fists. She shoves her pistol back into her holster and starts to turn. “I’m going to _kill_ Sarge, I swear to _fucking_ god –“

“Elena, wait, don’t. I really didn’t qualify, you saw how shitty of a shot I was on that range day. It’s okay, don’t get mad.”

“If that thing had got you –“

“But it didn’t,” I point out. “It ran away from you, if I hadn’t fucking tripped –“

“Roan, that is so fucking –“

“We are _moving_ , ladies!” the Sergeant calls from back in the main chamber, and then she gives me a look that says I’m being impossible and I give her a cheeky little smile.

“Thanks for saving me,” I tell her, and though she rolls her eyes she still smiles at me and the tension passes from between us and I stop breathing quite so heavily.

“Why do I feel like I’m going to hear that a lot from you?” she asks, and I shrug and then we hold hands for the next two hours, there at the back with Joker trudging along behind us with squishy pneumatic footfalls, and after long enough of that I finally, finally feel my insides loosen up and the terror that had been lurking inside of me gradually vanish.

The rest of the night passes without incident. We make it to the broad flat exposed bone plate that we’d planned to camp on and Fumi sets up a portable stove and passes around MREs. I get one that’s a vegetable omelet and though Elena offers to trade with me because apparently it is the foulest piece of food science that the US Military has ever seen fit to inflict on its soldiers and I, being a mere civilian, am unprepared to face its manifold horrors, I actually kind of like it, especially once I mix in the little hot sauce packet.

Afterwards, Elena helps me set up the weird hexagon-panelled tent, which I am hopelessly confused by, inside one of the many vents leading to the basin, which she explains is necessary because the tent has to brace against the vent walls in order to keep its shape. Eventually she laughs at me, though not unkindly, and tells me not to worry about it, she’ll set it up. The tents are two-person, and there seem to be a series of accustomed pairs, Fumi and Ellis, Klaus and Slate, Crookshank and the Sergeant. Elena, when I ask her, tells me that she got a tent to herself normally. That leaves Peter and Euler to bunk up together, but they seem to be getting along alright, so that all works out, I suppose. We’ve left Joker there on the bone plate by himself. Euler hasn’t shut him down but put him into some sort of guard mode so he’ll wake us if anything gets into the basin, but Elena assures me that up this high in the Pit nothing noteworthy is going to bother us. The biggest things up here, she says, are the shambles, and they only bother to attack isolated stragglers, things they know they can kill. They’re very fragile, apparently, and know it.

Elena goes to relieve herself and I clamber into the tent, lay out the mats and sleeping bags. I double-check the map on my suit computer, make sure I know which vent leads to the ballast bulb Makado had mentioned to me. Just thinking about it gives me shivers but I resolve not to worry about it until later. Then I strip my suit off and then shrug out of my underclothes as well. My hair is a little lank from being in a helmet all day and although I’ve applied antiperspirant liberally I can’t escape the suspicion that I don’t smell anywhere close to roses.

No matter. I drape myself across the sleeping bags in what I hope is a sexy manner and play with myself lightly until finally Elena unzips the tent.

“Sorry I took so long,” she says, clambering inwards. She hasn’t seen me yet, she’s making sure her pack makes it inside. “Fumi is fucking with the stove and –“

She sees me then and her mouth drops open. I keep my voice low and sultry.

“How should I reward my savior?” I ask her, and she puts the bag down slowly, a grin spreading across her face.

“I could think of a few ways,” she says, her voice low and husky, and then she is crawling over to me. Her lips meet mine and become entangled and she is slipping her suit down around her shoulders with my one-handed help, and then her hands are roaming over my breasts and my stomach and my thighs and the place where my thighs meet, and then what she does to me next makes me stop thinking.

* * *

“Mm.”

“That was nice.”

“Here, hold me. Tighter.”

“If I hold you any tighter I’ll break something.”

“Do you ever feel,” I ask, shifting myself slowly around in her arms so that I could face her, “as if you simply can’t get close enough to someone once you’ve just made love? Like, you’ve got your arms around them and you’ve put your leg up over their hip –“

“Like this?”

“Yes, just like that. And you’ve got your face pressed just here into their collarbone and you can feel them breathing against you, but it just isn’t close enough?”

“I know what you mean.”

“That’s how I feel.”

“That tickles, don’t kiss me there.”

“But you have such a nice collarbone,” I tell her. “How can I not kiss it?”

“God,” Elena laughs. “That’s so cute. You are so damn cute, has anyone told you that?”

“Once or twice, but I don’t mind hearing it again.”

“This really is your first time with a girl?”

“Yes, if we don’t count last night.”

“You’re very good.”

“Mm. Call me a good girl.”

“You’re a good girl.”

“Your good girl?”

“If you’d like to be.”

“I think I’d like that.”

Elena reaches up and puts her hand in my hair, holds me closer to her. I feel such a giddy upswelling of joy in my heart and stomach that I nearly start laughing. Elena feels it, some little shake or shudder in me, and looks down at me with sudden concern. “Are you okay?” she asks, and I nod.

“Yes, I’m just – happy.”

We are silent for a long while. I can feel Elena’s nimble fingers counting the vertebrae in my naked back, and her soft tapping touches make me shiver and clutch closer to her.

“Tell me about yourself,” she tells me, and I feel a little irrational stab of fear clench in my gut. “I don’t know hardly anything about you, just that we get on well.”

“Alright,” I say after a moment. “I grew up in Corpus Christi. No siblings, only child. I – “

“Me too.”

“Only child?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“God, no,” Elena laughs. “I was so lonely as a kid. My family, we lived way out in the boonies in Wisconsin, nobody around hardly. Just me and my folks.”

“It sounds nice.”

“You are not very much of a people person, are you?” she asks. She inclines her head downwards and kisses me on the forehead, and then I manage to scoot myself up enough that she can find my lips.

“What gave it away?”

“Tell me more. You grew up in Corpus Christi.”

“Went to school in Oklahoma. Got a degree in Literature, bounced around for a while doing journalist things. Worked at a television station for a while, ended up here.”

“How the hell did you end up here?”

“Same way you did, probably,” I grin. “Dumb luck.”

“No, really, I’m curious.”

Goddam it, Elena. I cup her breast in my hand. When I pull back from her to do so I can still feel her breathing against my chest, the ocean-swell rise and fall of hers fitting into mine. I run my thumb over her nipple and see her bite her lip, and I smile to myself, trying not to look too self-satisfied. Elena doesn’t let me enjoy it, though; she shakes her head at me and slips her hand over her breast, covers it from me. “Don’t avoid the question,” she says.

Goddam it, Elena.

I shrug, pretend embarrassment. “I knew someone in management who pulled the strings for me. Came in as an intern then got offered a full position and I accepted cause the pay was fantastic. I do clerical stuff, mostly, you know, data entry, office stuff. I was afraid to tell you, cause…”

“Cause why?”

I decide, for once, to tell her the truth. “Because you intimidate me,” I say. I look her in the eyes for as long as I can muster before I shut mine and bury my face in her collarbone again. I lasted about five seconds. Her eyes are ferociously grey. “Because I feel like you’re going to realize that I’m not –“

“I don’t want to know how that sentence ends,” she says firmly, taking my head gently in her hands and bringing it up to hers. “You lock that down,” she tells me, pressing her forehead to mine, staring at me. I force myself to look at her, even offer her a tiny smile, or at least I try to, but it feels like the same great hand that’s wrenching at my heart is tugging at my lips as well.

“I just don’t – Elena, there’s –“

Where the hell am I going with that? What am I going to say? There’s nothing I can say.

“Shh. Don’t.”

“Goddam it,” I mutter helplessly. She doesn’t understand, I can tell from the way she’s looking at me. Mute sympathy writ large in those wide, pretty eyes. Fuck.

“Look,” she says. “I’m having doubts too. I don’t know if – if this is really what I want, if this is really what’ll make me happy. I know it’s fucking stupid, I know it’s dumb, but I think about you, I think about…about being with a woman. Dating a woman, I guess, and I don’t know if – if that’s _me_. But I want to try, I want to see if this goes anywhere, I want –“

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

I let out a little laugh, barely a breath’s worth. “I have a lot of things I’m sorry for.”

“Has it been a while for you?”

“How do you mean?”

“Being with anyone, I mean.”

I feel like I’m going to cry. This isn’t going how I wanted it to. I don’t know how I wanted it to go. This isn’t it.

I feel a huge, stupid paroxysm of guilt welling up inside of me. I turn around so I don’t have to look at Elena, so she doesn’t have to look at me. She puts her arms around me, one arm draped across my chest, tucking me close to her, the other slipping down around my hip and pulling me closer in to her. I can feel the tapered v that her hips and her thighs make resting softly against my ass. She’s so warm.

“Roan,” she says. I can feel her lips moving against the back of my neck. “I don’t know what’s happened to you in the past, I don’t know what kind of shit you’ve had to go through. But I promise that nothing you can tell me is going to change –“

She thinks it’s about _her_. I almost laugh out loud at the simplicity of it. She thinks I’m having regrets, she thinks – she thinks whatever kind of pathetic moral compass I have spinning in circles inside of me is disagreeing with my monkey hormones’ efforts to make me cum. Goddam it.

“I’m gonna hurt you,” I tell her, knowing as I say it that it’s true. “I’m not going to mean to but I’m going to anyway, I’m going to hurt you, I’m going to fuck this up, and I don’t _want_ to –“

“Roan –“

“- and I’m fucking dreading it because the last relationship I was in was _not good_ , and I don’t want to believe that I’ve been changed by it, but –“

Alright Roan, you can stop now.

“Roan!”

I stop. I put my face in my hands. I feel a tiny drop of moisture on my back and I realize that Elena must be crying, and I roll over. “Oh no,” I tell her. “No, no, goddam it, don’t cry, I didn’t mean to –“

“ _You_ didn’t make me cry,” she tells me. “I’m crying because whatever happened to you, you didn’t deserve it, and hearing you like this makes me so sad –“

“Elena –“

She hushes me again and for a long, long while we lay there entangled, her lips pressed to my collarbone now, her sweet-smelling hair in my face, and she holds me so tightly that I finally begin to calm down. I think for a long, long while about what I should say, about what I should tell her that might excuse the – the mess I made of what should have been a relatively pleasant evening, but then as her breaths ripsaw upwards into tiny wheezing snores, I realize that it doesn’t really matter.

It takes me about ten minutes to slowly extricate myself from her grasp, to grab my suit and snake my way out of the tent with it in tow. I turn back around to zip the tent back up and I see Elena’s eyes cracked open, watching me, and though I almost jump I give her a soft little smile.

“Where are you going?” she groans, reaching out for me, and I lean back in and take her hand, bring it to my mouth and kiss her on the knuckles.

“I have to take a piss,” I tell her. “I’ll be back soon, go back to sleep.”

She looks as though she wants to protest but she’s too sleepy to do so. She gives me a little smile and then falls back onto her pillow, and I zip the tent up and shrug into my suit quickly. It feels strange and coarse on me, not having bothered to put on any underclothes beforehand, but it’ll do.

Then I turn and make my way as silently as I can towards the dark branching offshoot of tunnel that I marked as the path to the ballast bulb.


	5. Chapter 5

I keep telling myself that it’s enough to have gotten this far, this is an adequate demonstration of bravery, that I should be impressed that I kept my nerve enough to even get to this point in the tunnel, but even though my heart quails and I’m shaking lightly, a kind of mixed blend of anxiety and terror at the prospect that something might be stalking me down here, I stay where I am as though my feet had grown roots.

For there in front of me, just as Makado had said there would be, is the puckered, anus-like entrance to a ballast bulb. Only took me roughly twenty minutes of crawling through a tight, suffocating, pitch-black venterial canal, all manner of slime and scum and filth caking around my face and arms. My suit will be an absolute mess but nobody will know the difference, most likely; after this first day all of the pristine dull orange suits have become equally dirty, mine will just be a little fresher.

Getting out of the camp was surprisingly easy. I had crept by Joker with some trepidation, half expecting him to spring into life and go after me without Euler holding his leash, but all that happened was that the machine’s head had risen slightly as I had moved past and then settled down again.

I guess that after Makado and I had left to return to my hotel room and retrieve my gear, the team had asked Euler to showcase some of Joker’s other features and he’d activated some sort of autonomous mode. It had taken him some thirty minutes to set up, Elena had informed me, the back of Joker’s cranium hinged open and Euler poking around in there, but afterwards they’d lead him over to some sort of obstacle course Elena had called a ‘kill house’ and let him loose and the results had been so impressive and entertaining that they’d had Joker repeat the course four times before Euler had begged off, citing some sort of instability in the machine’s logical pathways…whatever that means. We hadn’t seen either of them for the rest of the day up until the party; Euler had explained, briefly, that he’d been working with the Engineering department to get radio tags working with Joker’s system so that while we were down here he know who was and wasn’t part of the team. Don’t go walking around without your suit, they’d warned us. Otherwise, if for some reason we do let him operate on his own, he might not know who’s who. Might act unpredictably.

Shades of Terminator, of Robocop. But I rolled my eyes at myself and brushed past him, let my hand press lightly against his burnished chestplate for just a moment – you can never be too superstitious – and then squeezed my way into the tunnel. There were no tents clogging its entrance on account of it being so small. I had to go on my hands and knees most of the way, except for a little bulbous bit in the middle where it widened up and I was able to stand.

I don’t know how I made myself go through it. I kept getting a prickling feeling along the back of my scalp, like something was stalking up behind me, but whenever I curled over and looked back there was nothing there, just the ribbed walls of the passage, like I was inside of a giant esophagus.

I had a panic attack halfway through. I don’t know what brought it on; I’m not prone to panic attacks, normally. I made it to a section where the tunnel dropped down a couple of feet, a sort of rough 45-degree angle, and I just started crying. I wanted fervently to be back at home in bed waking up from the crazy dream I’d been having. I wanted to go and listen to We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel and follow along to the lyrics and not hear anything odd or unusual, just have my mind skip over everything like normal and have it all be okay. I wanted –

I don’t know what I wanted.

But at the end of it I rolled over onto my back and closed my eyes, and then I sat up and smoked a cigarette from the pack I’d smuggled in with me. Just one cigarette, and then I crushed the pack in my hand and threw it away. I kept the lighter, though; you never know when something like that will come in handy.

Then I got back on my knees and pulled my way through the tunnel and now here I am, nose still clogged and runny, but feeling better.

I have a knot at the base of my stomach the size of a baseball and I keep looking behind me, frightened that something’s going to grab me and eat me and that I’ll never see anybody – especially Elena – ever again, I’m afraid that I’ll drink this stuff and that’ll be a wrap for me, the Pit will have gotten its claws in me and I’ll be different, I’ll be _changed_ somehow.

“Fuck it,” I mutter under my breath. The cigarette had calmed my nerves a little and, to tell the truth, I’d been craving one after a few days without. A momentary pang of regret few through me on ghostly wings; I thought for a moment about going back and finding the pack I’d discarded but then my lip curled at the thought of myself grubbing around in the muck looking for it. I’m not that pathetic.

Getting the bulb’s entrance dilated enough for me to crawl through is tough work. I’m buried up to my elbows in the thing, feeling vaguely nauseated at the wrinkled folds of flesh just a few inches from my face. There’s some sort of sphincter-like muscle there banding around the opening like steel cord but the more I press and level with my elbows opposed the more it relaxes. Soon it’s large enough for my head, then for my shoulders, but I keep going to make sure that I can fit through with the added bulk of the suit.

The smell is intensely strange. I had thought for a while that it might remind me of a Coke Heartthrob, especially with memories of the last one I’d had still relatively fresh in my mind, but the smell is completely different, more…earthy and spicy and invigorating. There’s still the same disgusting organic undertone to the air that pervades everywhere in the Pit, but it mixes with the drooling sweat odor pouring from the orifice in front of me to form something new and strange and…appealing. Appealing in the same way that a mixture of sweat and men’s deodorant can be appealing, appealing in the same way that –

I shake my head, try to clear it. Easy, girl. You’re just going to crawl in there, drink some of this stuff – I can feel my gorge rising again but I shut my eyes and count to five and breathe through my mouth and the feeling dissipates – and then crawl back out and go back to Elena and fall back asleep. That’ll be all.

The Pit groans, a little noise of stress and tension, and I jump.

“Fuck it,” I murmur again, and then I clamber into the orifice, feel it suck at my thighs and calves and feet as it tightens behind me, and then I slip down a slick, slippery surface of flesh and fall face-first into about three or four feet of murky, milk-white ballast. It takes me a moment to find a purchase on the rubbery flesh at the bottom of the pool but I do, finally, and then I come up sputtering, trying to clear my eyes. I haven’t drank any of it; some instinct screwed my mouth shut as soon as my head went under and I couldn’t force myself to open it for all that I tried.

I open my eyes and look round. The inside of the bulb is red and fleshy and membranous; there is a long rind-like deposit of something stretching between the ceiling and the floor, just a little off-center of the middle of the room, thick as a tree trunk. There are little curling wisps of some sort of vapor rising from the surface of the ballast; that must be what gives it such a strong smell. The odor’s grown even more intense here, inside the thing, and I can –

Huh.

I can feel something happening on my face, my hands, pretty much every piece of exposed skin that had gone under when I lost my balance and fell down the side of the bulb face-first. It’s hard to pin down at first, but then it resolves from an indistinct feeling to a light and pleasant tingling a little like the breathy feeling you get when someone’s been tickling you for a very long time and then they suddenly stop. I wait for a moment, cringing inwardly, but it doesn’t resolve into burning pain or – or whatever I expected, it just stays light and tingling and pleasant.

No wonder people liked to bathe in this stuff.

I raise my hand to my cheek hesitantly. The skin on my face feels softer somehow. Gentler, as though I hadn’t been baking in the West Texas sun for the last week or so. The same’s happened to my hands, I realize on closer inspection; the hard nubby calluses on either wrist, just above that little bone on the edge of the wrist, gained from hours spent working at a desktop typing, are now little more than suggestions of their former selves.

I spend a long while there, staring at my wrist, the detached headlamp light clutched in my teeth. What the hell is this stuff going to do to me if I drink it?

But the tingling feeling is already abating, and it isn’t as though it took my skin off, didn’t disfigure me. Most likely, anyway. I probably look a couple of years younger. I prod at my forehead experimentally; it feels a little tighter.

“Fuck it,” I say again, and then I cup my hands and dip them into the pool of ballast at my feet, and then raise it to my lips and drink.

The taste is surprisingly mild and savory. The texture, though – it’s thick, thicker than water. It feels as though I’m drinking some kind of oil and for a moment it’s enough to make me gag, but I force down a couple of swallows and then, almost as soon as it hits my stomach, I feel a heat building there, the same kind of warm, pleasant one gets after they’ve eaten a large meal and want to do nothing other than lay down somewhere and not think for a while, just without the accompanying sensation of fullness. This dissolves after a moment into the same sort of tingling that I’d felt on my hands and face, only a dozen times stronger, and it turns into a sort of burning, fizzing sensation that races through my body, and I double over with the force of it but I’m grinning, I’m grinning so hard, because I’ve never felt so good –

And then I move wrong and I nearly scream at the sudden jolt of pleasure so intense that I initially mistook it for stabbing pain. It takes me a moment, frozen, eyes wide, to identify what happened, and then, cautiously, I isolate my chest and move it gently, trying to brush against the inside of the suit, and it sweeps through me again and even though my knees grow weak and I hear a low animal moaning echoing in the bulb, it takes me a disconcertingly long time for me to realize that it’s issuing from my mouth.

When I had moved my nipple had brushed up against the coarse fabric on the inside of the suit and I had almost came just from that. I flop against the side of the bulb and feel my breast through the suit carefully; it feels larger than usual, swollen somehow, and taut and sensitive, the nipple hard enough to cut glass. I look down and I can see it actually poking through the suit.

I get shakily to my feet, trying hard to avoid any other accidentally brushes like that, and I realize that I am incredibly, almost discomfortingly, wet. There’s a throbbing in my groin like a heartbeat and a warmth that quickly turns into an ache, a _need_ for something to fill me. I shake my head again, trying to clear it, but it doesn’t do anything to help. I glance back down at the innocuous milky ballast; did I drink enough? Two cupped handfuls – not that much. But if it’s already doing this to me, can I handle more?

My hand, I realize, has gravitated to my crotch, and I’ve started rubbing myself through the suit. “Goddam it,” I hiss out loud, pulling my hand back like it was burned, my body aching for it to come back.

I can feel a small trickle run down my leg and I feel my lip curl, first in disgust, then it curls further into a lascivious grin. I think for a moment about undoing the bottom of the suit and just masturbating there, thinking I might get the demon off of my shoulders and out of my head with an orgasm or three, but while my hand is idly massaging my breast through the suit I think of Elena and such a surge of lust goes through me that for a moment I can’t even breathe. I squeeze at my chest through the suit until I feel pain and that wakes me a little, and then, still grinning, I rise and start to make my way back to the orifice, head filled with all of the things I’ll do to Elena when I get back to the tent, hands quivering lightly with anticipation. I find the light and fumble with it clumsily for a moment before I click it on and angle it up towards the opening so I can make my way out, but then when I see what the light is shining on I almost scream again and it is only the sudden presence of mind that makes me clap my hand to my mouth that stops me from shrieking.

_For there, at the mouth of the bulb, is a pale human arm, stuck elbow-deep inside the orifice, and gradually levering it open!_

I click the light off and drop into a low crouch and then slowly creep backwards, taking care not to make too much noise with the wet ballast up to my knees. I make it to the pillar-like deposit of – of whatever the hell it is in the center of the bulb and skirt behind it just as I hear the soft groan of the bulb’s sphincter giving up the fight against whoever is trying to make their way in here.

I scarcely dare to breathe. I can feel my heart thumping a million miles an hour and I can feel terror gnawing at me, trying to get its fangs in, but for the moment I’ve mastered myself. Whoever it is, they have a much more powerful light than I do, but they don’t seem to have spotted me; the light sweeps once, twice, around the inside of the bulb and then I hear a sliding sound of something heavy and then a definitely male grunt as whoever it is splashes into the ballast. I hear him set the light down and then indeterminate splashing, but at the very least he doesn’t seem to suspect I’m here.

Now that the immediate danger is over my body is urgently reminding me how horny I am. I bite my lip and bear it; if anything the feeling seems to be intensifying rather than falling off, especially since I’m not doing anything about it. If I don’t consciously think about it and stop myself I find my hands gravitating back to my breasts, to my groin, little twinges of pleasure making me bite my lip, suck in soft breaths. Finally I end up just putting my hands on my cheeks and keeping them there, to hell with whatever aching neediness I feel between my legs.

I shift a little to the left and peek around the waxy deposit growing out of the ceiling and my mouth drops open; I see Crookshank’s ruddy cheeks and unruly sideburns, his powerful barrel chest heaving as he scoops handfuls of ballast from the pool and rubs it on his arms, his cheeks, his face. He’s undone his suit, the halves of it flopping around his waist, and as I watch he slaps the liquid on his bare chest, rubs it in like lotion.

This continues for another few minutes before he kneels and takes a great gulp of the fluid, and I gasp lightly, for he lapped up so much more than I had, and even though he is much bigger than I am and perhaps the same principle as alcohol applies, perhaps he can handle much more of it, I shudder to think of what that much of the fluid would have done to me.

He stands there for a long while, leaned against the wall, eyes shut, his cheeks slowly growing even redder, and then he zips his suit down further and starts to jerk himself off. I lean back around the deposit and force myself not to think about it but I can’t help it, I can’t get the image out of my head, I can’t stop myself from salivating over it, from thinking of the way it’d feel inside of –

No. Stop. He’s going to jerk off and then he’ll leave and then you can get out of here and never talk about this ever again.

But if that’s the case, goddam it, why am I fucking touching myself, why is it so much easier to peek my head around the corner like this and watch him and rub myself through the suit. He’s not even hot, he isn’t my type, fuck, I wouldn’t have thought twice about him, but with this – with this _drug_ in my body I can’t stop myself from thinking about him taking a fistful of my hair and bending me over and then forcing himself into –

 _Stop_.

I crouch there in the dark, reeking of ballast, listening to Crookshank grunt rhythmically as he fucks his hand, and then finally he lets out a louder grunt and I swear, I swear I can hear it hit the ballast. I’m crying, I realize again, something’s short-circuited inside of me and all I can do is cry and rage at the stupid animal cage I’m trapped in, the stupid animal cage that wants to get bent over and fucked and used. I don’t want to have to think, I don’t want to have to be like this, I don’t want to -

Crookshank leaves and I finally let out a shaky breath. I’m still unbearably, agonizingly horny. I think about touching myself, about just getting it over with, but again I think of Elena, and I think of Crookshank, of goddam motherfucking Crookshank grunting like a bear in heat, and suddenly I feel as though doing it here would make me vomit. I don’t want to see this place again, I don’t want to even think about it. I want to just go back and crawl into the tent and let Elena hold me and wake up clean. Except…

I eye the murky surface of the ballast.

What if the amount I drank isn’t enough? What if I should have drank more, what if if I leave now I’ll be throwing away the only chance I get? I doubt we’ll have time for me to sneak back here on the return trip, and even if we did I don’t want to take my chances running into Crookshank or whoever else.

But Christ, if the small amount I drank is doing this to me…

I reach down and cup a small amount in my hand. I raise it to my mouth and then stop, then I shrug and drink it down, stand there and sway and shudder as the heat intensifies. I put my arms around myself and clutch and just hold my ribs tight until I feel as though I can move, and then I make my way to the orifice and force my way out of it. It’s easier going out than in, although I still have to squeeze. I nearly shriek again as it presses against my breasts unexpectedly and the sudden pressure and sensation makes me buck my head, momentarily lost in the sensation, but I claw my way out. The smell of ballast has become sickening, and as I crawl my way down the long ventricular canal back to the camp I feel as though it’s clinging to me and I’ll never be able to get it off, no matter how many showers I take, no matter how hard I scrub myself.

I pass my discarded pack of cigarettes and laugh to myself even as I ache to see if any of them escaped destruction, but I keep my dignity and pass it by. Well, some of my dignity; I’m so horny now that even the soft rubbing together of my thighs, a motion forced by the tight quarters where I have to go on my hands and knees, is becoming unbearable. I keep arching my back and imagining filthy things and pawing at myself, but somehow I manage to keep enough of my mind from crumbling in on itself to make my way back to the camp. I squeeze past Joker again, trailing my fingers along his shoulders, the cool dull spark of the metal on my fingertips seeming newly sensitive to my revitalized fingers. It’s late, it’s so late, but I feel agonizingly awake. I find the tent, slip out of the suit as quickly as I reasonably can, leave it crumpled on the fleshy floor next to Elena’s neatly folded suit, and then I unzip the tent and clamber in.

Elena’s eyes are tracking me there in the dark, little glittering jewels glinting at me. She rolls over as I move fully into the tent and I am so unspeakably happy to see her that for a moment I can do nothing more than squat there on my haunches with an idiot grin plastered all over my face before she smiles at me softly.

“Hi,” she says, her voice grown innocent, still heavy with sleep.

I breathe her name like it’s a prayer and then I am kissing her and she kisses me back, a laugh bubbling in her throat as she does, and I can’t stand it any more, I have to be closer to her, I want all of her, I want everything, and while she makes little delighted sounds of amusement and disbelief at how insatiable I am I kiss my way all over her, grinding against her thigh as I do, and when she reaches up for me and finds my breasts I shudder and arch my back inwards, trying to press more of myself against her.

“Missed me?” she asks, her thumbs working in slow circular motions. She has a smug little smile on her face. I’m panting I want her so bad. I don’t trust myself to speak so I just nod. Her hand trails upwards from my breast and I let out a little whining moan. It fixes around my throat, squeezes lightly, and I swallow. Her other hand tracks down my stomach and I can feel my hips buck gently as I know what’s coming, and I grin at her, but she stops just before where I want her to, tangles her fingers in my pubic hair, massages me there, and though I try to angle my hips forward and slide her fingers against me, wet and slick and willing, she stays agonizingly still.

“Why do you smell like ballast, Roan?” she asks, cocking her head at me. Her eyes have gone cold and calculating and her grip on my neck has become very, very strong. I want to fuck so badly that the well of fear bursting in my gut is something I can barely recognize, barely react to. I open my mouth and let out another little moan.

“Elena,” I groan, “I don’t –“

“Oh, don’t lie,” she murmurs. I see her eyes flick down to my nipple and then she darts forward and latches onto it with her mouth, eyes still fixed on mine, at least until she brings her teeth together extremely gently and I shudder, starbursts blossoming in my vision. Then she lets me go with a wet pop that I find incredibly, unspeakably lewd. I feel as though my cheeks are on fire.

“Your name isn’t Merriweather either, is it?” she asks me.

“Elena,” I say again. It’s all I can say. I can’t summon the breath for anything more complicated.

“See,” she says, “after you left I thought I’d stay awake until you got back. But you took a long, long time. So then I started thinking,” she says, punctuating the statement with a sharp gesture downwards with her finger, just brushing against me, and it feels like heaven.

“Y-you can’t,” I start, giving her a pleading look, but she’s enjoying this too much. The torture will end when she wants it to.

“Then I looked up your personnel file, cause I wanted to creep on you. Only guess what?”

I shut my eyes.

“Right,” she says, squeezing my throat a little tighter. “You don’t have one.”

“Elena,” I say very carefully, trying to keep my voice from pitching upwards into a moan, “I can explain.”

“I’m sure you can,” she says. When I crack my eyes open she’s looking at me with something resembling sympathy. “But I don’t care about that right now.”

“You don’t?”

She moves her hand downward, lets go of my throat. I gasp slightly, and then when she inclines her middle finger slowly upwards and brushes against me I gasp harder. “Tell me this is real,” she says.

“W-what?”

“Tell me,” she repeats slowly, “that this is real. That you aren’t using me to get down here, that there’s not some ulterior motive at play. Tell me it’s real, Roan.”

Her finger presses inside of me and I collapse against her, bury my face into her neck, kiss her again and again, leave a trail of bite marks in my wake. “It’s real,” I moan into her ear, and then she fits another finger into me and all I can see is her wide grin growing wider before the night dissolves into a parade of sensual enjoyments, of flesh and reactions and noises burned indelibly into my frantic, pleasure-drunk brain.

* * *

When we’re done finally and whatever effect the ballast had on me is fading, Elena curls me into her arms and I kiss her softly. My mouth and tongue are still a little tired but it was infinitely worth it. We stay like that in fuzzy oblivion for only a moment before Elena inclines her head and nuzzles at my forehead with her nose.

“So who are you really?” she asks me. “What’re you doing here?”

“Oh,” I groan. “It is a _long_ story.”

Elena laughs quietly. “Well, we’ve got nothing but time.”

“It must be so late,” I tell her. “Shouldn’t we get to sleep?”

“It’s midnight.”

” _What?”_

“See?” she asks, twisting around a little to show me her watch. It’s a huge clunky tactical-looking thing. I almost laugh at it. “Down here the name of the game is early to bed, early to rise. I know Sarge will get us going later though, cause of you and Euler. You won’t be used to it.”

“Well,” I say, not knowing what else to. Elena holds me tighter.

“So tell me,” she says simply, and so I tell her.

She handles it well, but it’s not a very difficult story. It even makes sense in places, I think. I skirt around the main issue for a while but eventually seize on it and just tell her. When she doesn’t react I glance up at her, meet her level gaze. “It’s only transmitted through blood-to-blood contact,” I say quickly. “So we don’t have to worry about –“

“I know how it works,” she tells me. “Still sort of the thing you ought to tell someone about before you fuck them.”

I feel myself flush; Elena sees too. She takes my chin in her hands, looks down at me. “It’s okay,” she tells me. “I get why you didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I said it’s okay.”

“I’m sor-“

“Shh.”

We lay there in silence for a while longer. “They told you you were allergic?” she asks. “At the hospital?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“That’s what they said? Verbatim?”

I can feel everything shrinking into myself. “Yes,” I say quietly. “I think so, I – yes.”

“Or did they say it was _like_ you were allergic?”

“No, they – well. I don’t know. You’re making me doubt myself.”

“Medicine can go off,” she says. “It can go bad. If it did and they didn’t know and used it anyway, if it had been mislabeled, you might have gone into shock, you might have –“

“I don’t want to –“

“Shh,” she says again, holding me to her. I try to pull away but she doesn’t let me. More than anything I want her to stop asking questions, I want her to just hold me here and not judge me, not say anything. I feel fragile, I feel like a thousand needles are poking in at me just millimeters from my skin and if I make one motion they’ll stick –

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and she laughs.

“What the hell are you sorry for?” she says. She runs a hand through my hair and try as I might not to like it, I like it. I like the way it feels. “What else were you going to do?” she asks. “You were scared, you didn’t know any better. You wanted to run from it and not confront it, I don’t think there’s shame in that. And then you found out about this place and everything just fell like dominoes.”

“Yeah,” I agree in a small voice.

“Fucking cruel of Veret to send you down here, though.”

“I asked for it,” I say. “She didn’t want to.”

Elena grunts.

“You don’t like her much, do you?” I ask.

“I think,” Elena says after a long time, “that after 2007 she should have gotten as far away from this place as she could and found something that made her happy.”

“I don’t understand –“

“Makado made it her mission to make sure the Pit could never hurt anybody ever again,” she tells me, “when she got Head of Sec. But that’s impossible, you know. The thing’s so large, there’re so many ways in, so many ways out, you can’t do anything about it. She lets it eat her up.”

“You didn’t call her ‘Veret’ just then,” I point out. Elena looks at me.

“I don’t hate her. I just think that she isn’t suited for the job.”

“You really don’t care that I lied to you?” I ask her.

“About who you are? No. In the same circumstances I’d have lied to you.”

Elena has been kneading my hipbone gently with her thumb for the past five minutes, and the rhythmic motion is going to put me to sleep soon. I kiss her again, near her collarbone, and shut my eyes. Elena holds me tighter, there in the dark, and for a moment I’m able to not worry.

Just as I’m about to drift off, all wrapped up and warm and happy, still basking in the afterglow, I feel her thumb stop.

“But if I find out that you’re lying about this being real…” she murmurs, very softly, clearly thinking that I’ve fallen asleep, and there is such a knife-edge of menace in her voice that I lay there for a long, long time in her arms, even after her breathing has become low and regular and even, trying to will myself to fall asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

My eyes flutter open and for a moment I lay there, not comprehending what I’m seeing. There’s a window ahead of me, and the blinds have fallen down halfway, and a ray of sunlight is stabbing at me slyly through them. The air is soft and cool and comfortable and carries the same familiar stench of acrylic paint, and when I put my hand down to my side and feel at the blanket covering me it’s a scratchy, rough, worn one that I know very, very well.

Then I bolt out of bed and dart over to the window and rip it open, stick my head outside and stare. The bright blue sky leers down at me, and when I crane my neck and look down the side of the building I can see the street signs, one canted at a crazy angle like it’s always been. Corner of Franklin and White, Corpus Christi, Texas. I look back in the room; it’s empty. Queen bed. The other side is made up still and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

After a long, long while I go back in and close the window, pad over to the dresser and take one of the oversized flannels out and shrug into it, leave everything else bare. It nearly comes down to my knees anyway, I’ll be warm enough in just this.

I end up sitting in the overstuffed armchair in the living room staring at the dull blank slate of the ancient cathode-ray TV that’s been squatting decrepit in the corner for at least the last four years. In the screen my distorted image glowers back at me.

Either this is a dream, or the Pit is.

I’ve been pushing and prodding at the conclusion like a toothache for the last half an hour or so, my legs tucked up under me to try and keep warm, but I can’t see any other way I would have gotten here. Not realistically, anyway.

I keep thinking about what Peter told me, about the dreams he’d had, and wonder. Then, fifteen minutes later, when I don’t see any sign of waking and I’ve pinched at myself enough to cause bruises, I conclude that I’ll wake later.

Or maybe I am awake, and the Pit was a dream. But why do I shy away from that so heavily? It’d be a neat get-out-of-jail-free card, wouldn’t it?

Maybe it’s because if it was a dream I would have woken up in my own bed in my own apartment. Wouldn’t I have? I can’t imagine a series of circumstances that would have lead me back to –

A shadow passes the window, blotting out the light, and then moves past. Something about it gives the impression of stateliness, of a slow lumbering bulk. The light is different in its wake and I can feel a twinge in my stomach as I look over. The curtains in here are drawn and I cannot see out but the _color_ of the light is wrong, there’s something off about it. It is, I realize belatedly, the wrong shade. I’d just woken up and the light was blue and hard and sharp but now it’s dull and orange and aggressive, the color of a Florida sunset.

Something inside myself screams at me not to, but I get up, feeling suddenly vulnerable, standing there naked except for the flannel. I go to the window and reach out to open the blinds. My hand is shaking, I notice, and my lip curls. Then without giving myself time to hesitate I fling them open and stand there gawping at the roiling mountains of ropy, sinuous flesh outside. The sun is struggling through a gasping red haze in the air and all of a sudden I can smell it, I can taste it on my tongue, that meaty umami Pit smell, so dank and organic I can feel it coating the back of my throat. I gag and paw at myself and my hands come back with an oily sheen.

Outside the world is like someone threw a fleshy sheet over everything. I can see apartment buildings and skyscrapers downtown prodding through but they’re wrapped in it, great twisted whorls of flesh, rivers of mucus and slime and blood, weeping sores, trees crackled and half-bent beneath fatty folds. I can see things moving, far off, indistinct insectile things lurking in the dark beneath the shadows of the coated buildings. I can hear screams.

My heart is pounding and then after a moment I realize that it’s the door, that someone’s at the door, hammering at it, and then Thor calls out and I stop, everything stops.

I haven’t heard his voice in so long and part of me aches at its touch, like the sound were made of heated steel.

I go to the door cautiously and look out through the peephole; I can see the rivulets of flesh running along the hallway, and in fact they are so thick that it might as well have been straight out of the Pit. Only a few errant little patches where the ugly floral wallpaper peeks through give any indication that the room is inside of an apartment block.

Whatever anger I might have expected to feel when I see Thor isn’t there inside of me when I reach for it. He just makes me sad now. Especially like this, looking around anxiously, watching his back. I throw the latch and open the door and he jumps a little, and I am devouring him with my eyes, sweeping him from head to toe. Massive slab-like chest heaving, beard and cheeks rugged, eyes dark and stormy. Christ, I shouldn’t have opened the door, why the hell did I –

Thor sweeps me into his arms just like he always does, and I melt just like I always do. He holds me there, feet a solid six inches off the ground, just staring into my eyes, and I’m halfway towards slapping him, halfway towards yelling at him to put me down, that he doesn’t have any right to just act like nothing’s changed, when he kisses me, and the rest of my willpower flutters out of my body.

Then inside of my mouth his tongue splits apart into multiple individual entities with scuttling legs and chitinous carapaces that wriggle around and then force themselves down my throat, and I can feel them all the way down, and though I try to struggle he crushes me to his chest and I can feel it break apart like his ribs were toothpicks and he stuffs me inside of himself, my arms and legs bending backwards until they snap, but I can’t feel it, all I can feel is the raw abraded stump of his tongue writhing deeper and deeper inside of my mouth, and I’m screaming but I can’t breathe, all I can do is make wet moaning shrieks while I stare into his eyes, watch his pupils pop and multiply like frog eggs, his head having followed me somehow inside of his chest, and –

“Roan!”

Something slaps me across the face and I sit bolt upright and smack my head on the upper retaining bar of the tent. I open my mouth to scream again but then I realize that I’m staring into Elena’s wide-eyed, worried face, and I can’t do anything but burst into tears. “God,” I keep muttering, hiding my face from her in her shoulder as she pats my back softly and murmurs against the side of my head that it’s okay, that it was just a bad dream.

Someone outside rattles on the tent bars. “What the fuck is going on in there?” the Sergeant barks, and I feel Elena stiffen next to me.

“Roan had a nightmare, Sarge, that’s all,” she calls back. “We’re fine.”

“Well,” he says, his voice taking on a horribly cutting tone, “tell _Merriweather_ there to keep it down. The rest of us are trying to sleep.”

Something about the way he spits the name makes me shudder, even if it isn’t my real name. Elena feels it and holds me tighter, and I lean my head up and kiss her on the neck. “Don’t worry about him,” she tells me when we break apart. “His bark’s worse than his bite.”

“I just don’t like yelling,” I tell her, inwardly cringing at how infantile it must sound. “I’ve never liked men who yell.”

“Well,” Elena laughs, “I think you might be on the wrong team for that.”

“Yeah,” I groan, flopping back onto the sleeping bag. I still feel a little nauseous; I keep running my tongue over the inside of my mouth, cringing at the way it felt in the dream. It had seemed so real…

“Can I ask you something?”

I flick my eyes over at Elena just as she darts her gaze away from mine, pretends to busy herself with smoothing out the little compressible camp pillow at the head of her sleeping bag. “Yeah.”

“Who’s Thor?”

“Fuck,” I blurt as soon as the name passes her lips. “Don’t tell me I said –“

“You were yelling it,” she tells me. “And then you were doing this weird thing with your tongue like you were choking –“

“Oh my god,” I groan, putting my head in my hands. Elena reaches over and runs her hand along my back.

“Hey, stop,” she says. “I want to help.”

I think about that for a while, trying to loosen my tongue and just _tell her_ , dammit, if she hated you she wouldn’t act this way, but something in me revolts at it, and it isn’t until she leans over and digs my face out from my earthen palms and kisses me, very seriously, that I relent. She starts to say something and from the look on her face I can tell that she thinks there must be some sort of _damage_ , there must be some sort of…I don’t know, underlying pain, and it’s that look that snaps me out of it, that sets a curl to my lip that I quickly banish.

“Thor,” I tell her, “is the name of my ex-boyfriend.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not like that,” I say quickly. “I dreamed –“

But before I can tell her I think of what Peter told me and I cut myself off.

“It doesn’t matter what I dreamed. It wasn’t a sex dream or anything like that, it –“

Elena is laughing too hard for me to go on. I can feel myself blushing and I set my mouth very harshly and roll over, but she feels me moving and holds me tighter so I can’t. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she explains. “I wouldn’t care if it had been. I just thought it was so funny that that’s what you were concerned about, that you were worried that I would, I don’t know, be jealous that you even _have_ an ex-boyfriend.”

I think about that for a while. “I guess I still don’t know what to think of you,” I tell her. I lean my head into hers and touch her nose with mine; I feel it scrunch up as she smiles at me. “I don’t have a name for the way you make me feel.”

“In a good way or a bad way?”

“In a hopeful way.”

She grunts affirmation, kisses me again, a quick peck that traces down my neck and my bare chest and settles on one nipple.

“Then let me make you feel good,” she breathes, and then her hand is working along my thigh to the moist cleft between my legs, and I feel my heart do a funny little throb in my chest. I reach down and stop her, bring her hand back up to clasp around my back. She looks up from my breast, shoots me a confused glance.

“If we’re going to be serious about this,” I tell her, stomping down on the little voice in the back of my head going _but what if,_ “I want this to be based on something more than just sex. Because sex is great and you are very good at it,” I tell her, trying not to grin too widely, “but I want to – I want to fall in love with you, not your fingers and your tongue and your pussy.” I wince at her. “Okay, that might have sounded better in my head, but –“

“I know what you mean,” she tells me. “And I think that’s very, very admirable of you.”

We lay there in silence like that for a while. I run my fingers through her close-cropped mop of blonde hair. Eventually I just ask her, and brace myself for the response. “What do you want this to be?” I say, and she turns her face up to me. “If you want this just to be sex I’m okay with that but – but we should _know_ what it’s going to be, we should –“

“I haven’t been in a real relationship in about three years,” she tells me, settling her head back down onto my chest. “Not because my last one was particularly bad or anything, but because for the last three years I’ve been on this team and I knew how bad of an idea getting involved with any of them would be. Yeah, there’s been some sex. There’s been some brief emotions involved here and there.” I feel her lips draw back as she laughs at herself. “But I knew that anything definite would have torn this team apart because I was the only woman on it, so I’ve played the cold bitch for a long time.”

“I don’t think you’re like that,” I say reflexively, and she laughs.

“I know I’m not. But if you play a role like that for long enough you find it hard to stop.”

“So what –“

“I’ve always been curious, you know,” she says, flicking her eyes down to my breasts. “I always wondered but I never really found anybody I’d really like to experiment with.”

“God,” I groan. “I know exactly what you mean. I always thought I might be bi, but aside from one time in college when I made out with a girl at a party –“

Elena slaps me very lightly across the cheek and I squeak in surprise.

“I thought you told me I was your first!” she cries in mock outrage, and then when I try to explain she laughs and starts tickling me and the situation devolves from there, and then when we’re done and I’ve stopped shuddering I look at her, still hunkered over me, and reach down and slap her face lightly.

“I thought I said I wanted this to be based on something other than sex,” I tell her, and she laughs, still a little out of breath, and collapses onto her mattress next to mine.

“Then you shouldn’t have sucked on my nipple so much.”

“Uh, you started this.”

“Nope, I was just tickling you. You’re the one who went there.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Tell me about Thor,” she says, and I look over at her.

“This is really what you want to talk about?” I ask, and she nods.

“Yeah,” she says, reaching for me. I settle my leg above her hip and she puts a hand on my ass. “I want to get to know you better.”

“Bit of an odd place to start,” I grumble, and she laughs.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

I think about Thor. It’s a little like poking a sore on the inside of my mouth, one I’m hyperaware of but have been trying to avoid.

“Well, his real name wasn’t Thor. It’s Richard, but everyone called him Thor because he looked the part, you know. Big muscles, beard, long hair, everything. We met in college. Well, actually, I was in college but he was bartending at this pub I’d go after class most nights. Then I ended up interviewing him for the college paper I was writing for cause, Christ, what was it? Right, because he was an eyewitness for an armed robbery at the liquor store down the road. We sat down for a couple of hours in the bar on his day off and did way more flirting than interviewing and then after that he asked me if I wanted to go out with him sometime and I was already smitten by then so of course I said yes. The rest’s history.”

“He sounds nice.”

I open my mouth, then close it again while I try to think of an adequate way to respond to that. “Yeah,” I say finally. “He could be nice.”

“How long were you two together?”

“Six years.”

“Damn. And you never got married?”

I laugh. “No. I was too scared of the commitment. And Thor – I don’t think he really wanted to get married. We talked about it sometimes, in the abstract, about getting married and having a kid and all of that shit, but I don’t think either of our hearts were really into it.”

“Do you think that was because of who you are or because of your relationship?”

“What do you mean exactly?”

“Like, do you personally want kids? Or to get married? Not necessarily to him but just in general.”

“I don’t think I do. I’d be too scared I’d fuck it up. Like, both, I mean. I’d fuck up a marriage and I’d fuck up a kid.”

“I don’t think you would,” Elena tells me, and I smile at her.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I know you don’t believe me,” she says, rolling her eyes. “But I really don’t think you would.”

I gather her tighter to me and leave a kiss on her forehead, and then from somewhere against my chest she asks me what ended up happening between me and Thor, how the relationship ended, and I sigh to think about it. “What was your last relationship like?” I ask her. She shrugs.

“Fine. Lasted about a year. Sex was good but I didn’t love him.”

“And he loved you?”

“Yeah,” she laughs. “It’s an old story.”

“The oldest,” I agree. “Well, me and Thor, I think we did love each other, but if you’re with someone for six years you end up hating them, all of the stupid little things that they do that they never change, you start seeing the bad more than the good, and I don’t think we loved each other enough to stick with it through that. We didn’t handle it well, though, we both wanted to make it work so we’d get in these huge screaming fights over really stupid shit and then we’d break up furious with each other and we’d resolve not to see each other again, we’d go meet other people, and then when they hurt us we’d come back. We always did. There’s something about that familiarity, about knowing someone so well that you can always come back to them when you’re hurt, that would glue us back together for another month or two, and then we’d get in a fight again. Rinse and repeat.”

“It sounds awful.”

“It’s something you grow into. Then he ended up getting HIV from someone he’d fucked and giving it to me, and now I’m here. I was furious at him. Aside from when I called him and screamed at him when I got the test results I haven’t talked to him since.”

Elena is quiet for a long while. “I’m sorry,” she offers finally.

“It’s okay. Both of our faults, really. With that kind of lifestyle we both probably should have been getting tested for things like that more often than we were. It was just this great big self-destructive spiral and you don’t…you don’t have the energy or the willpower to change it until it chews you up and spits you out.”

“Well…” she says, looking up at me. “What’s the next step? You’ve got to keep moving forward.”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. I think right now I’m focusing on just…existing by myself. Six years is a long time. I have to figure out what I think of myself again.” Then I realize how that must sound and I start to backtrack. “I mean – you’re…you weren’t part of the plan, but I don’t mind rethinking –“

“Roan,” Elena laughs, reaching up for me and tugging me back down against her, “you overthink everything, don’t you?”

I settle against her, let the tension flow out of me. It takes a moment but I’m able to do it, let myself relax. “Maybe,” I grumble, and she laughs again, rich and throaty.

“Why don’t we just let things go however they go?” she suggests. “Don’t worry about anything definite, don’t worry about stupid fucking _labels_ , let’s just get through the expedition and then see how we feel about each other after?”

“I like labels,” I say in a small voice. “I don’t like feeling uncertain.”

“You feel uncertain about me?”

“Not really,” I admit. “I’m just afraid that –“

“Then shh. Save it.”

“But –“

“Roan, it’s three in the morning,” she says, gently admonishing, and I start.

“Wait, really? I thought it was way later –“

“Well, it’s not. Now you want to hold me so we can both go back to sleep? Tomorrow’s going to suck if we stay up much later.”

And with that she nestles her head against me and closes her eyes and it is very simple for me to just lay there and breathe, feeling her hands gripping my back slowly grow more and more limp, and then I manage to fall asleep as well, despite her soft whispery snores in my ear.

* * *

The morning is relatively quick. We wake at seven or eight or so – I left my wristwatch back in the barracks so I don’t have access to an accurate measurement of time, and trying to work the geriatric software in the wristpad is a little beyond my sleep-addled brain. I feel relatively well-rested; waking up at three certainly didn’t do me or Elena any favors but she offers me a caffeine pill and I take it gratefully, and once it kicks in later during our leisurely MRE breakfast I do feel a little more alert.

The mood is more cheerful than I’d expected. It feels for all the world like we’re just on a camping trip. If anyone is feeling anxious about having to go deal with the copepods they’re doing a very good job of not showing it. I take a couple of candid shots while we’re sitting around the communal stove – Crookshank gesticulating, big grin on his face, telling a story to Slate, who’s lazing back on his elbows, MRE tray resting on his chest; the Sergeant sitting cross-armed and alone but eyes cut to the left, listening to the story as well; Fumi and Ellis in the middle of trading their cheese spread packets; Peter grinning at me and waving from across the circle; Euler rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

It all feels very distant from yesterday, but maybe it’s because I’ve _done_ so much since. Even the shamble seems like it was a whole month ago at least, it doesn’t seem real. And I can even manage to look Crookshank in the eyes; after last night I didn’t think I’d ever be able to, but when our gazes accidentally meet we offer perfunctory smiles to each other and then carry on as though nothing had happened, although perhaps for him that’s less surprising than it is for me.

Altogether too quickly breakfast is over and then we’re on the move again. The next couple of hours take us to the terminus of the Organ Trail, a vast bowl-like depression of flesh that Elena informs me was once a bile bladder of some kind, and then we take a left and go through a man-made channel bored through the flesh of the Pit. I stare at the ceiling, wondering at it, at the scarified criss-cross of the retaining plates and stents. Everything looks very old here, and for a while I’m concerned, wondering if it’ll come crashing down on top of us, but it stays very still and strong and resolute throughout our passage, even when Joker’s clanging footsteps resound off the metal walkway and put an unhealthy shudder to the entire enclosed path.

I look back at Joker today less than I did yesterday. I haven’t observed any more episodes like in the gondola ride down, and so I’ve gradually begun to let my guard down around the machine. Not like keeping my guard up would do anything; if it did decide to go crazy and kill all of us I don’t think there’d really be anything we could do about it. Maybe if someone nailed it with one of the big forty-millimeter slug rifles that about half the team carry that might put it down.

I’ve been around guns before, even shot some, but the slug rifles are in another league entirely. They are without a doubt the biggest guns I’ve ever seen, and the slugs they fire are so large that my mind doesn’t even register them as bullets, more like big cartoony grenades, like something you’d throw.

Elena did end up going and talking to the Sergeant about them not issuing me a pistol at least, but he shrugged her off, pointed to my pitiful efforts at the range and stated that me with a deadly weapon would be ineffective at best, a downright liability at worst. As much as I wanted to protest I couldn’t help but agree with him. I flinched too heavily whenever I pulled the trigger, couldn’t manage to hold the thing properly no matter how carefully Ellis and Fumi had coached me, and when I’d set it down finally, cordite stench reeking, I’d managed to hit three shots out of the twelve-round magazine I’d fired. One was a perfect bullseye, though, and even though everyone else put it down to beginner’s luck, I felt as though for that one shot, everything had functioned perfectly and I had grasped, just for a moment, the ephemeral calm needed. Fifty yards out and I’d nailed it and I felt certain that was _me_. Then for the other seven shots left in the magazine I wasn’t able to catch it again.

Well, mixed feelings. Can’t defend myself if something decides to make a snack of me. Have to rely on other people; not feeling very robust. Robustness defined as capability to do things by oneself. But consider – a little nine millimeter pistol would not be helpful against anything that was really determined to hurt me down here. And there’s no way in hell I could handle one of those forty-millimeter guns. They wouldn’t even let me even _try_ to fire one at the range, even braced, because there was a decent chance it’d dislocate my shoulder. What I _could_ have used was something like a bowie knife, but I guess they didn’t think about that very much. Everyone else has one, or at least a similarly large knife, hanging off of their belts, but they didn’t issue me one. Maybe that’s what I should be concerned about, that I didn’t get my standard-issue ranger knife.

Lots to think about, stamping along there in the back with Elena and Euler and Joker. Lots of conversation up in front, lots of laughter, but aside from quiet murmurs here and there Elena and I seem to be content to just enjoy our mutual presence, and Euler is equally quiet and reserved. Personally I think he’s still a little unnerved by our surroundings; I’ve grown used to them far more quickly than I thought I would have, but sometimes when I look back I see Euler gazing at the walls or the ceiling or the wet, sticky, red-veined floor with something approaching trepidation in his tight-set lips, clutching at the remote control like a talisman, working the joysticks mechanically without even looking to make sure Joker keeps putting one foot in front of the other. I’d squeezed Elena’s hand and then fallen back, walked with Euler for a while, asked him all sorts of questions about Joker. The remote, he told me, seemingly happy to have someone asking about something, I gradually realized, that might have been his life’s work, wasn’t for fine motions or anything incredibly precise. The machine brain inside Joker knew, he said, how to balance, how to grab things, how to walk, the remote was just for telling it where to move, what to grab, and so on. The eventual goal was for the remote to not be necessary but they weren’t confident enough in the robot’s autonomy yet for that to be possible, outside of limited and controlled circumstances.

I think again of Joker’s hand clenching hard enough to strain metal, there in the dark of the gondola, just inches from me, and wonder.

I say goodbye to Euler, filter back up. Elena has worked her way up into the rest of the group and is speaking animatedly to Fumi and Ellis about something. I watch her for a while, lit by the bobbing headlamps from behind, smiling to myself, and then someone nudges me and I look over to see Slate walking alongside, tall and handsome and shining even inside the helmet and the lumpy ranger suit. He grins at me but more gently than the other night at the party, and I can’t stop myself from smiling back at him. We haven’t spoken much, other than a few perfunctory comments here and there, but now he inclines his head down to me, nodding ahead at Elena.

“You and Novak, eh?” he says, his tone mildly congratulatory, and I flush immediately but it’s accompanied by a warm, slightly furry sensation that I recognize after a moment as gratification at implied acceptance, and so I grin cheekily up at him, and shrug.

“Is it that obvious?”

Slate tilts his head as if considering. “Well, you do spend most of your time together, but I wouldn’t think that was out of the ordinary considering you’re the only two women on the team…” he says, and I start to say something, but then a smirk curls his lips. “…except I saw you two holding hands here in the back for like six hours yesterday, so I put two and two together.”

Something about this strikes me as so funny that I laugh hard enough for Klaus to slow his pace, fall in step with us, and ask what the joke is, and then me and Slate are both laughing at Klaus’s slightly bemused expression, but I reach out and put my hand on his shoulder and assure him that we aren’t making fun of him, that it was something else, and he’s a good sport about it. I walk there for a while sandwiched between the two of them, washing in the realization that the acceptance I was so hungry for back when I first met the team has come and found me so subtly that I didn’t even realize.

Slate and Klaus and I talk for a while and I only have to make up a couple of stories about my dismally ordinary life in Admin. Klaus is very quiet, I discover, but whenever I look over to see if he’s still paying attention I see his eyes glittering at me very alert and contemplative, the cast of his face screaming ease at me from every pore. And Slate – well, Slate isn’t so bad, not really. Maybe I had been too quick to judge at the party.

It feels like a knot somewhere inside of my heart is undoing itself and the feeling of looseness is so distantly-remembered that for a while it feels as though something is wrong.

Eventually has to go up and put the hydraulic stent he carries into a narrow passage, and so he leaves us, pulling a face as he goes, and then it’s Klaus and me, standing there in the middle of the pack, Crookshank, the Sergeant, and Slate up at the front fiddling with the jack and the rest of us watching. I realize something after a moment and then lean over to Klaus.

“Hey,” I say. “What’s the Sergeant’s name?”

Klaus laughs softly. “He’s South African,” he says. He has a soft, lilting Spanish accent. “So he has a long, unpronounceable Dutch-sounding name. He got tired of all of us saying it wrong so he just told us to call him Sergeant.”

I think back to my brief high school Die Antwoord phase and suppress a grin. “Reasonable,” I mutter.

“Eh?”

“I said that that’s reasonable.”

Klaus nods. He’s only a little taller than me, and very slightly built. I’ve wondered a little about what his role on the team must be but after watching him move over the past couple of days I figured out that he must be some sort of scout. There’s a lithe kind of panther’s grace in the way he moves, even in the bulky plated suit, and he’s accidentally startled me a couple of times just because of how quiet he can be. We talk for a little longer but he’s mostly interested in stories about my ‘work’ at Admin and I keep steering the conversation in other directions and he picks up quickly that I don’t really want to talk about it. He isn’t rude enough to pry, though, and we quickly lapse into small talk. He has a son and a wife back there in Gumption somewhere, and the way his face lights when he talks about them does something funny to me that I can’t immediately identify.

He fumbles around in a pocket for a while, there in the middle of the crowd, bobbing headlamps and quiet conversation and the grunt of effort and muttered curses there in the front while Crookshank and the Sergeant and Slate struggle with the goddam motherfucking wing nut on the side of the goddam motherfucking son of a bitch fucking hydraulic jack, goddam it motherfucker _turn_ will you, and pulls out a photograph of the three of them, looking like it was taken at a barbecue or something. Wide smiles. His wife is very pretty. I tell him so and he smiles at me, an echo of the miniature one in the photo.

Then the jack pops into life and we’re stomping through the vein. I end up behind Elena and goose her lightly and she turns around, neck awkward and stumpy in the suit, and grins at me through the glass plate of the helmet. She reaches back for me, catches my hand and squeezes it tightly. “You doing alright?” she asks. “Haven’t seen you much all day.”

“I’m great,” I tell her. “Just been hanging out. Smile,” I tell her, and she looks down at the camera and sticks her tongue out, holds it there. I let her go for a second or so, then laugh. “It’s video.”

“Oh, right.”

We eat a quick perfunctory lunch a little later, there at the lowest point of the organ trail, a sort of off-branching tributary that meanders horizontally through about a mile of flesh before we reach the Cord.

Spectacular doesn’t even begin to cover it. I hadn’t really asked questions about our destination because I’d made assumptions about what it was, but when we came to the hollowed-out clearing and the Sergeant had opened the enormous and terrifically old metal submarine door set into the exposed bone there and ushered us inside, I hadn’t known what to expect – but certainly not a spiral staircase set around the inside of the Pit’s spinal cord. There in the middle, suspended in air and protected by a solid case of glass and metal, is a intensely complex filigree of thin gossamer nerves, tangled and bundled and flowing with light, thick corded globs of it surging blisteringly fast up and down the length of the spine for as far as I can see in both directions, until it fades into murky darkness above and below.

Elena catches up to me while I’m standing there gawking and laughs at me, especially when I take her hand and hold it there, just for a moment, catch her up and get her to just stand next to me and stare.

“Pretty, huh?”

“I had no idea,” I say softly, my eyes tracking a particularly fat and slow-moving bundle of light, “that they’d built inside the _spine_ of this place –“

“It’s not really the spine. There are a bunch of cords like this, there’s like five or six,” she informs me, cutting her head to the left and getting us moving again. “This one was just the most convenient to use for getting up and down vertically. It goes all the way down to the Gift Gardens.”

“To the what?”

“The bowels. Long story. Tell you sometime later.”

“But these nerves –“

“They put this in a _long_ time ago,” she says, gesturing at the burnt-out lights, at the metal stairs. “When they didn’t really care about the Pit’s wellbeing. We’re probably the first people to have used this in at least a decade.”

“Why don’t they get rid of it?”

“Too much effort,” Euler guesses from behind us. “Not enough budget.”

“Yeah,” Elena grunts, glancing back at him. “And too much damage taking it out, now that the Pit’s grown back around it.”

We walk in silence then, accompanied only by Joker’s echoing footfalls, until finally, what feels like a couple hundred feet down, we pass through another thick door and into Oyster’s Shame.

I understand the name, or at least part of it immediately, for as I look around my light catches the surface of the vast, rugose, spleenlike organ and it shimmers and breaks apart into a soft pearly opalescence that reminds me of the ocean, of the way the light catches the water in a tidepool.

The surface is deep and spongy and pockmarked with perfectly round craters, each about as big around as a queen bed or so. Here and there the craters still have occupants – vast round balls of _something_ , cakey and flaking, a dirty off-white color. Some of them have crumbled but others, perhaps newer ones, have more of a lustrous shine to them, similar to the sheen on the walls but deeper in a way, like layers of more and more subtle colors and gradations of white. Craning my neck upwards I see dozens if not hundreds of tinier bulbs forming there on the ceiling, dangling down from thick fleshy strands. Some of the larger ones sway lightly, bulging and pregnant. Are they eggs? Some kind of cocoon for the larva of a creature that lives down here? I go to ask Elena but something in her face stops me. There is some kind of air of reverence here, something I can’t put my finger on. Even Crookshank and Slate up in the front have grown quiet.

We pass in a winding single-file trail through Oyster’s Shame towards the squatting bulk and artificial lines of the Deep Listening Station, hunkered there like a cat licking its lips, light pouring from its portholes, but the closer we get to it the more I feel as though something must be wrong.

The door is open, the great porthole standing open, and the light inside is flickering and indistinct.

We stop and spread out in a rough semi-circle ahead of the doorway. The Sergeant’s face is drawn and grim and for a moment I don’t understand why, but then I look inside and see the trail of blood leading into the station and curving a sharp left out of sight, see a bloody handprint on the wall like it were a scene out of a horror movie, and as everyone around me unlimbers their guns and coaxes as many reassuring metallic clicks and taps out of them as they can, all I can see, all I can train my camera on, is the cold, pale hand lying limp on the floor, the arm it’s attached to extending further back deeper in the station, into gloom that my eyes can’t penetrate, the fingers curled as though beckoning us in.


	7. Chapter 7

Elena pats me on the back again and I raise a shaky hand to my mouth, wipe my lips on the back of my wrist. The suit tastes rubbery and horrible and the cloying plastic aftertaste of it mixes with the bile on my tongue in a truly awful way.

She looks a little green herself but she’s holding it together better than I am, at least. None of the others on the team, even Euler, lost their lunch.

“You okay?” she asks softly, but I don’t trust myself to speak, not yet. I shake my head narrowly, trying to avoid any sort of quick motions, trusting the roiling feeling in my gut. I don’t think there’s anything left for me to yak up, really, but just the quick convulsive retching motion is enough for me to want to die.

Thank goodness Elena had seen what was going to happen and hit the quick-release catch on my helmet first and shoved me outside. I shuddered there on my knees puking my guts up, the indelible image of the mangled body there in the station burned in the backs of my eyelids, the terrified face, the marks as though something had taken a great ice-cream scoop to the man’s neck and chest, huge welts and suck-marks like he’d been mauled like an octopus. And then, of course…

“I don’t understand it,” I hear Crookshank saying from inside the station. The rest of the team is huddled around the body still, with only myself, Elena, and Klaus still outside. Elena’s laid her rifle down on the floor but Klaus still has his in his hands, low around his hips but ready to bring up and fire at a moment’s notice. I can see his eyes darting around the titanic space we’re in, not panicked but watchful. “I don’t understand it,” Crookshank repeats. “Anything that could have torn a man fucking clean in _half_ would have been too damn big to get in here.”

More voices, Peter says something and the Sergeant mutters a curse, same disgusted tone of voice strained even harsher. “I have to tell Veret _something_ ,” I hear him growl.

I blow a breath out and stagger to my feet. Elena takes me under the arm and helps me up and I cling onto her gratefully. I feel a little better now, but I don’t know how I’ll handle seeing that body again. I’d never thought of myself as having a particularly weak stomach, but I guess I’d never seen anything that gruesome up close. Even Rey’s death, just a couple of days ago, was relatively clean from my perspective. He’d been a fair distance away from me and the bullet had entered the back of his head; I’m sure the front would have been ghastly but he fell on his face, and I never saw anything other than that small red pinprick swelling with blood before he fell and that was that.

“Was that your first time seeing a dead body?” Elena asks me softly, and I shake my head.

“No,” I tell her. My voice is shaky and I cough, feel the coating of bile at the back of my throat shift, and then I swallow hard. The taste of it surfaces again and I make a face. “No,” I repeat, a little more clearly. “The other day when Rey – well, you’d know him as the guy who tried to rush the Pit –“

“Wait,” Elena says, frowning. “You were there? I heard that they picked up a couple of people who’d gotten in somehow and one of them got shot, but I didn’t know you –“

“Yeah,” I say. I realize belatedly that I’d sort of skimmed over this part when I’d told Elena how I’d arrived at the Pit. “Peter got me in and –“

“What?”

I look at her and frown. “What?”

“ _Peter_ got you in?”

“Uh, yeah, he – wait, you didn’t know he was doing that?”

Elena is staring at the station. There’s something smoldering at the depth of her gaze and I realize with an immediate stab of trepidation that I may have just fucked up. Inside I can hear Peter’s voice. “- I’m telling you, a shamble wouldn’t have been able to do this –“ he says, all I can hear before Crookshank’s rough baritone drowns him out.

“Are you telling me,” Elena says, “that Peter’s the one that has been letting all those people in all these years?”

“I thought you knew,” I say quietly. I can feel the anger pouring off of her and it makes me nervous, like I’m eyeing a very large dog that’s currently in the process of sizing me up. “I thought it was common knowledge, I thought _everybody_ knew –“

“Roan,” Elena says, her voice tight. “I’ve had to _kill_ somebody because of that bastard.”

“What?”

Elena pinches the bridge of her nose. “A couple of years ago,” she says, “someone got in with a bomb. And just like the other night, they were running at the Pit, they were going to chuck the bomb down the orifice. I was on patrol that night, I shot him. I shouldn’t have even _been_ on patrol but someone was fucking sick and they didn’t have anyone else. The entire time I was with the Coast Guard I hadn’t even fired a gun except at the range, I was a damn cave diver. You’re telling me Peter’s the person who’s been letting them in?”

“I thought you knew,” I repeat helplessly. “I thought _everybody_ knew, I didn’t know it was –“

“Does Veret know about this?”

She looks over at me then and goddam it, I flinch. “Yes,” I tell her, my lips barely moving. Elena spits.

“That fucking _bitch_ ,” she growls. “Did she know the whole time?”

“Elena, please don’t –“

“Did she fucking know?”

Klaus looks over, a frown on his normally tranquil brow. “Elena,” he starts, but she shoots him a murderous glance and he holds his hands up and takes a few steps further away, shooting me a sympathetic glance as he does.

“Yes,” I tell her, feeling as though I’m stabbing Makado in the back.

“That _cunt_ ,” Elena says, very quietly. She gets to her feet then, with purpose, and starts for the station, but I reach out and take her by the wrist. She tries to jerk her hand free of me but I hold on tight. “Let go of me, Roan,” she says.

“Elena, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not mad at you,” she tells me. “This isn’t your fault. This is Peter and Veret, they’re the ones who’ve been letting people in so they can fucking die down here, so they can profit off of fucking thrill-seekers. I am going to blow the lid off this so hard that –“

“Wait,” I say, realizing that she must not know. She must not know about the disease, the fucking – psychic illness or whatever the hell it is. And then I realize that if I try to explain, I’m going to sound like a damn lunatic.

Makado had said it was fairly top-secret. That it’d get me put on a list. So it must be something the regular rangers didn’t know about, except for Peter of course.

Elena’s looking at me expectantly and I don’t know what I’m going to tell her.

“Please don’t,” I go with eventually, knowing how lame it is. Elena’s eyes soften fractionally.

“Roan,” she says, using the same tone one might to explain something difficult to a child, “I know he’s your friend, shit, half this team idolizes him in one way or another, but what he did was _not okay_. And he deserves –“

“There’s something you don’t know,” I blurt. “Something I can’t tell you, something secret. It wasn’t about the money, he had another reason, he and Makado both had a good reason, but I can’t _tell_ you –“

I can see anger flash across her face for just a moment and knowing that it’s directed at me feels like something is torn inside of me, like some very important piece of tissue just behind my ribs has broken open and is leaking everywhere. “Roan –“ she starts, and then her eyes flicker across my face and I see her bite her lip. “Don’t cry,” she tells me softly, and then I feel the little trickle of moisture making its way down my cheek, and I turn away with a mumbled curse, wiping at my face.

“Goddam it,” I growl, and Elena takes my hand hesitantly, and though my initial instinct is to whip it out of her grasp, I’m able to stop myself.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Hey, hey, stop. It’s okay, I’m sorry.”

“Do you trust me?” I ask her.

“Yeah, of course.” Zero hesitation, as if it shouldn’t even be called into doubt. I smile a little.

Klaus has taken a few steps further away and is minding his own business so obviously he might as well be screaming it. The poor guy is clearly uncomfortable and something about the way it’s so telegraphed is immediately endearing to me. “Okay,” I whisper. I feel Elena lean in behind me. “Then trust me on this. Please.”

She blows out a big breath; I can feel it on the back of my neck and immediately a stream of goosebumps race down both my arms. I take a step backwards, a very small one, and feel her against me. I want her to hold me but she doesn’t.

Elena holds herself very still, and then gradually lets my hand go. I turn and face her. “Please,” I tell her. I put my arms up around her neck and pull her closer to me, touch our foreheads together. She doesn’t want to but she smiles, avoids my eyes. She bites it back down after a moment but I still saw it. “I want to tell you but –“

“Why can’t you?”

“Because it might put you in danger.”

“Why the hell do you know, then?”

“Because Peter and Makado told me.”

Elena snorts. “So they gave you an excuse and you believed them?”

“It wasn’t an excuse,” I say sharply, then soften my tone when Klaus looks around at us. “It wasn’t an excuse. It’s a secret. Nobody’s supposed to know. The kind of thing that gets you on a list, that gets you disappeared if you try to tell someone.”

“Bullshit.”

“Thought you said you trusted me.”

“Wow, ouch.” Elena scrunches up her nose and nuzzles against mine. “I do trust you,” she says. “I trust that you believe what you’re saying. Whether it’s _true_ or not is a different story.”

“I’m not sure that’s the same thing as trusting me.”

“Look,” I tell her, “just don’t do anything – don’t do anything stupid. Not yet. When this is all over we can –“

She barks a laugh, pulls away from me grinning. “Alright, I’ll wait to do stupid things until after the mission.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, I just thought it was funny the way you said it,” she tells me. Somehow her hand has found mine again and I can feel myself starting to relax. Then her face grows darker. “Roan, do you know how many bodies I’ve had to retrieve from gastric pits? I’m the only diver on the team, there’s two of us in the entire company. Anytime they find somebody else, it’s either me or him who has to suit up and dive in and grab the remains. How many? Guess.”

“I don’t want to –“

“Guess,” she tells me, more insistent now.

“Since you started?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Ten? Twenty?”

“About a hundred.”

“ _What_?”

“Like one-fifty or one-seventy-five total, cause the other guy got hired a year after me, so for the first year I handled all of them, 24/7. Do you have any idea what it’s like, diving into an acid pool, knowing that if there is a single spot of wear on your suit that you didn’t catch, a single tear somewhere that you didn’t see, you could end up either dead or crippled?”

“Elena, I –“

“Do you have any idea,” she says, her overcast eyes shining, “what it’s like to dive down there and find a puddle of jelly with a dissolving ribcage and skull sticking out of it? What it’s like to see half a face staring at you, with a gastric bristleworm peeking out of the eyesocket and trying to bite you? And you have to gather it all up and bring it back up with you, even if your hands sink into it and it feels like fucking jello?”

“No, I don’t,” I murmur. My stomach’s done an uncomfortable lurch in step with the images she’s putting in my head and I close my eyes and focus on my breathing.

“I have nightmares sometimes,” she says. “Well, not sometimes, more like most of the time. About those dives, about the things I found down there, about the acid getting into my suit and burning me alive, about drowning in it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

“I’m still sorry. You don’t deserve that.”

She offers me a little snort, fleeting mirth tempered with something approaching despair. The way she looks at me, I realize, this must have been eating her for – for years. At least. “Deserve,” she says, spitting the word like it’s a curse. “I won’t rock the boat – for now. But there’s going to be a reckoning when we’re done here, and if Veret and Peter can’t give me a _very_ good reason why they let this happen, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

She looks at me menacingly, as if daring me to argue with her, and I bundle up the knot of trepidation lurking in my throat and toss it aside. “Okay,” I tell her. “I’m okay with that.”

“You are?”

I shoot her a skeptical look. “Yeah, duh. This whole trip, this whole time I’ve been down here, you’ve been the _only_ –“

“Merriweather!” the Sergeant roars from within the station. “If you’re quite done puking your guts up out there, I need you inside to take some pictures!”

I pull a face at Elena and turn to go, but she grabs my wrist. “Wait,” she says. “The only what?”

“ _MERRIWEATHER!”_

I roll my eyes. “Tell you later?”

“You better,” she growls, but it’s with an unwilling smile, and then I turn and blow my breath out and walk back into the station, trying not to focus on the way my boots stick in the blood, still wet and glutinous on the floor.

* * *

“No,” Peter says again, patiently, “it _could not_ have been a copepod.”

“Goddam it,” Crookshank says, his face growing redder, “what else has the strength to do this?”

“A copepod can’t fit inside the station. Even a small one wouldn’t be able to, it would not be able to get through the door.”

“So it tore him apart outside.”

“And what, threw the body in here?”

I’m still feeling a little queasy but even I chuckle at that, just a little.

“I don’t care what the hell did it,” the Sergeant says, “so stop fucking arguing about it. I just got off the phone with Veret and checked with her, there should have been four other people down here other than this guy. Hughes, you and Sato did a sweep of the entire organ, you didn’t find any trace of them?”

“Nothing at all,” Ellis says. His eyes are wide still. “Like they disappeared.”

“Sato,” the Sergeant says, turning to Fumi. “How many arterioles branch out from Oyster’s Shame?”

“All of them, or just ones a person could reasonably fit through?” he asks. He’s already started tapping at his wristpad and I can see a map of our surroundings, wireframed and ghostly, hovering and rotating there.

“Just the ones a person could get into.”

He taps for a little longer. “There’s eighteen.”

“Alright,” the Sergeant says, looking around at us. His eyes are dark, menacing, purposeful. They settle, eventually, on Euler. “Mister Euler, get Joker set up in the center of the organ. Same defensive characteristics as we went over last night.”

Euler nods and hustles outside, and then we hear the thunderous squelching footsteps as he gets Joker set up. I look around for a panicked moment and then remember I’d left my helmet on the table in the other room – I’ll just grab it before I leave. The radio tag in it is what keeps Joker from thinking I don’t belong.

“Everybody, pair up,” the Sergeant says. “We’ve got eighteen vents to search and not much time to do it in. I want constant radio contact, and if anyone finds anything, get on the horn immediately. Understand?”

The team nods and murmurs assent, and favorite partners join up, slide on helmets, check magazines. I crouch down on my haunches and continue photographing the bent steel on the interior of the doorframe. It looks as though a titan hand had reached in and caught itself there, crunching the metal to oblivion. Then I realize the Sergeant is still standing there, staring at me.

“Uh.”

“Miss Merriweather, ‘everyone’ includes you.”

Behind him, Elena gives me a little wave and a grin. “You want me to go out there?” I ask. “And, you know, search for –“

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m a _photographer_.”

“You’re a _body_ ,” he corrects me. “Do what you’re told. Novak, with me.”

Elena frowns, glancing at me. “But Roan – “

“You girls can have your tea party later. I need you to check a gastric bulb that’s along vent 45-b out of here. Merriweather, you’re with Hughes.”

Ellis and Fumi share a glance, then a shrug, and the groupings rearrange, and with a sigh I rise to my feet, my knee letting out a loud crack that nearly makes me jump. Ellis grins at me and I grin back and for a moment, just a moment, I’m able to forget about the body, or what remains of one, lurking there in the other room.

* * *

For the dozenth time since we made our cautious way into our assigned ventricle, Ellis whips around, his slug rifle held in far too shaky hands for my taste. “Did you hear that?” he asks again, and I give a perfunctory and weary glance behind us.

“Nope.”

“You didn’t?” he asks. “I could have sworn…”

“Ellis,” I say gently. “Do you think you might be, I don’t know, a little freaked out right now?”

“Freaked out? Me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not freaked out,” he says. “I’m just, you know.”

“Staying alert?”

“Yeah,” he nods. “Exactly.”

There’s an ominous gurgle from ahead and I stop. “Okay,” I say, “this time I heard that one.”

“I did too,” Ellis says, glancing over at me. “But I think that was just the Pit.”

“Just the walls or something?”

“Yeah. You know, contracting.”

“Oh, okay,” I say, and relax a little. “You’d know better than I would,” I say, more for my benefit than his, and he nods.

“I was going to mention,” he says, peeking both his head and his gun around the corner upcoming. “I thought it was really brave of you to, you know, even volunteer to come down here.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, of course. Not a lot of people would do that, much less people, you know, without any real training.”

I laugh. “Are you calling me brave or foolish?”

“The two overlap, don’t they?”

“To a certain degree. Are we not going that way?” I ask as Ellis walks back past me the way we came, gesturing for me to follow. He shakes his head.

“No, the passage narrows, we wouldn’t be able to get through. There wasn’t anything down there anyway.”

So we head back. Other than the normal assorted creepy-crawlies all over the place there hasn’t been any sign of the ephemeral monster, big and strong enough to tear a person in half at the waist, ragged splintered spinal cord leaking –

 _Stop_.

We haven’t found any of the other four people who worked at the Deep Listening Station, and judging by the lack of transmissions on the radio, none of the other pairs have either. I’d been a little apprehensive at first, watching Elena and the Sergeant vanish down a cavernous fleshy hole in the pockmarked wall of the chamber, while Ellis and I edged around another one of the vast pearl-like waxy secretions slumped cratering in the spongy floor, but after about half an hour without any radio calls other than routine check-ins, I’d began to relax. Ellis hadn’t, but I’d began to realize that he was just naturally a high-strung, twitchy little bastard, so maybe that’s understandable.

We’ve got two more vents to check, and in all likelihood they’ll be as empty as this one. It seems as though whatever did the deed in there, in the station, just crept in, killed the poor guy in there, and then ran off with his legs. It didn’t seem, in Slate’s expert opinion, quite _messy_ enough in there for it, whatever it was, to have actually eaten the lower body while it was inside the station.

But then, I’d thought to myself, why would it have ran? Most animals I know of prefer to scarf everything down immediately if they’re able to. Harder to get your food stolen if it’s inside your stomach. Maybe that rule doesn’t apply inside the Pit, but it seems logical. Then, another thing – yeah, most animals will run off with food that’s too big or too much to eat right away, but if that was the case, why leave the upper body? Those marks on it certainly seemed like evidence of some kind of consumption, I guess, although not a method I was familiar with, but there was still plenty left to eat on it. I try to keep my mind from wandering onto the terrible expression on what was left of the man’s face but I’m not successful, and I grimace inside my helmet.

It’s pointless. I don’t know any of these creatures, I don’t know what sort of twisted behaviorology evolution has forced on them. Maybe it made perfect sense to run off with the legs without eating them.

_But what the hell happened to the other four?_

That’s the question eating at me, and I can’t see any way around it, I can’t see any meaningful explanation. They’d left their suits behind so they’d left in a hurry, they didn’t leave any communication, no logs or notes or anything. Ellis had looked through the computer system there and hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. It was like they just…decided to leave. Went for a walk and hadn’t gone back.

I think back through a dozen foggily-remembered spooky stories of similar disappearances, picked up through sort of cultural osmosis, absorbed from clickbait article titles and five-second daytime TV snippets, but I can’t think of anything useful. And then, because there really is nothing else to do, I look over at Ellis. “Alright,” I say. “Tell me what you think happened in there.”

“In the listening station?”

“Yeah.”

He blows a breath out, lets the words fade. All I can hear is squelching footprints and vague writhing from the flesh around us. “I think,” he says finally, “that whatever it was, I think it’s smart.”

“Yeah?”

“Cause, think about it,” he says. “It gets in there, it’s big and tough and strong enough to rip that dude clean in half, you know? What makes it want to leave after that?”

I shrug. “Maybe it was chasing the other four.”

“Nah, nah, nah, see, I bet it didn’t give a _fuck_ about the other four. It knew it was in a place where humans were and even if it managed to kill one, shit, even if it managed to kill all five of them, it knew we were going to get mad and come looking for it.”

“So you think it ran away?”

“I think that it’s hiding somewhere, watching us, waiting for a good moment. You know?”

“Christ,” I mutter, “don’t say things like that.”

“I’m just saying, we have to be realistic.”

“What do you think it _was?_ ”

Ellis shrugs. “Copepod, that’s what I figure. I don’t know what else would have been strong enough to tear someone in half like that.”

“Peter thinks a copepod wouldn’t have fit inside the station,” I point out, remembering what I’d heard earlier while I was busy throwing up. Ellis shrugs.

“Who knows, man. All I know is, there’s some bullshit going on here and I don’t want to be anywhere near this place when whatever did it decides to come poking around again.”

We pause back in the main chamber so I can pop another SD card into the camera. I’ve manage to save it from the worst of the wear I was anticipating we’d run into but it’s still slick with gore from hours spent in the Pit. I’ve managed to keep the lenses clean, for the most part, and as far as I can tell the footage I’m getting is decent, but there’s going to be a _lot_ of it.

I’ve been trying not to think of the next steps we have to take. If we’ll even keep going, after what’s happened here, after what we’ve found. Maybe Makado will want to pull us out, send more people down.

Or maybe, I reckon with a little sinking grind at the bottom of my stomach, maybe this is just normal here in the Pit. Maybe it’s normal to have one guy dead and four missing, maybe that’s just – Christ, what _day_ is it? Down here it’s so dark that my mind just registers it as a constant endless night. I don’t even know what time it is, how light it ought to be on the surface. If I look at the time on my camera all it says is 6:54 PM, but I know I never set it properly, I didn’t bother to, so there’s no way that’s accurate. I’d ask Ellis but he’s gone back to jumping at shadows again. He keeps asking me if I saw that shadow down at the end of the vent we’re searching next, and I keep telling him that I was busy fumbling with my camera, I didn’t see anything.

I think he just misses Fumi. The past couple days the two of them have been inseparable, and I assume from how they’ve been acting that that’s the normal state of affairs for missions like these.

Ellis shakes his head finally. “I don’t know, man. I’ve been down here for too long, my eyes are playing tricks on me. You know?”

I can’t help but smile at him. “Yeah, I know,” I agree, slapping my camera closed and booting it up again. We stand there a little longer while it does and then finally I angle it upwards at him. “Smile,” I tell him, and he does, throws up a peace sign as well. “Beautiful.”

“At least you got my good side,” he grins, and I can’t help it, I laugh, even though it’s a dumb joke. Then we let the sound trail off and we make our way into the vent, the ribbed, dripping ceiling closing over us like the roof of a mouth.

We don’t have to wait long before it happens. Screaming, muffled as though it were passing through multiple layers of flesh, and then gunfire, and even though it too is muffled it still makes me and Ellis flinch.

“Sounds like it’s right fuckin’ next to us,” Ellis says, working the action on his rifle. The radio has ignited with voices, calling for status and such, but among them I can’t hear Crookshank’s deep, surly growl. I frown.

“Wait, it’s Crookshank. Crookshank and – who?” I ask. Ellis thinks for a moment, then nods.

“Slate,” he says. “They got paired up.”

We rush our way back to the main chamber, then listen. The screaming and gunshots have died down by now and left in its wake an ominous silence. I don’t see anybody else, although the radio is still squawking down at my belt. Everyone else must still be deep inside their vents, it was just chance that we were at the mouth of ours.

A gunshot sounds again and this time I have a fix on it – I saw the blare of a muzzle-flash reflecting crazily off the sweat-slick walls of a vent on the other end of the chamber. I point to it and look back at Ellis, the words already forming in my mouth, but I can see from his face they aren’t necessary, he saw it too.

Whatever trepidation and nerves he might have felt before are gone now, I can see. His mouth is a thin-set line and I can see determination in his eyes, and without anything more than a nod we both set off sprinting towards the vent. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest but in a good way, in a reckoning sort of way, like I’ve grabbed reins I never knew were hanging just in front of my face.

We don’t even make it to the mouth of the vent, though, before Crookshank blazes out of it as though the devil were chasing him, bowling me over and careening into Ellis. The man’s face is red as a beetroot and his eyes are wide and terrified. Ellis had almost shot him before our headlamps had caught his face and suit and we’d realized that he wasn’t a monster, some prehistoric annelid come back for seconds. Ellis struggles with the larger man’s weight for a moment but finally gets him back on his feet. “John,” Ellis says, “what the fuck –“

“Don’t even fucking go down there!” Crookshank yells. He staggers a little and then breaks into a run again, heading for the station. He knocked the breath out of me and that combined with a heavy landing right on my ass left me dazed for a moment, but I manage to clamber to my feet with a minimum of cursing.

“Where the fuck is Slate?” I shriek after him, trying to keep my voice even, but Crookshank ignores me.

“Goddam it,” Ellis grunts, and then takes off after Crookshank, and then I’m alone.

“For fuck’s sake,” I mutter, dusting myself off – or perhaps ‘wiping’ is a better word in this environment. I thought I heard some sort of crunching noise from the camera when I fell but I don’t think I landed on it, and I spend a moment checking to see if anything is broken – I can’t find anything obviously wrong with it so unless it starts corrupting recordings, I’m fine.

Then I remember that I’ve been huddled here like an idiot tapping at my camera with my back to the vent Crookshank came bursting out of, and I whip around, eyes like dinner plates, half-expecting something horrible and nasty to be right behind me, but of course there’s nothing. I glance back at the station and see some of the other members of the team rushing for it – and there’s Elena too, in her wetsuit, padding along with the Sergeant right behind her.

When I turn my attention back to the vent I think I see something move, down there in the dark, but I can’t make it out. I reach up and angle my headlamp a little downwards but I can’t see anything other than pink flesh, scored by veins and tumors and callouses. “Slate?” I call out after a moment’s hesitation, my voice horribly shaky. I let my lip curl at myself and take a step or two inwards, and then it moves again, further down in the dark, where my light peters out.

I’ve got my camera slung low at my waist but I bring it up to my eye, then reach up further and turn my headlamp off. The night-vision mode isn’t very good but it might actually reach a little further than the headlamp does…

“Where’s Roan?” I can hear Elena asking, back in Oyster’s Shame. She sounds a little panicked. “Ellis, where the hell is –“

I open my mouth to call out that I’m right here, but before I can cold terror seizes my lungs and I can’t make them work, I can’t make my mouth form the sentence. On the camera screen, once the wash of the night-vision had finally clicked over and I could make out _something_ down there at the end of the vent, before it curved over to the right. I made out a mass of writhing, squirming ropes or tentacles, but that was all, it was gone far too quickly for it to really fix in my mind. But in one great ropy appendage I thought it held -

And then Elena’s found me and she’s practically hauling me out of the vent by the collar of my suit. I see a flash of her eyes, wide and worried, staring into mine, before she spins me around and shoves me towards the station with enough force that I stagger. “Go inside,” she tells me, voice low and urgent, in a tone that’ll brook no argument. When I look back I see four of them, her and the Sergeant and Fumi and Peter, all with their guns at the ready, vanishing into the vent, the darkness swallowing them up even as the pale, faltering light of their headlamps stab at it.

“Don’t go down there,” I start to say, “there’s a … a thing,” but Elena has already gone and vanished, and with nothing left to do I turn around and walk back to the station.

It doesn’t take them long to get back, and when I see that they’re all still there, all still intact, my heart does a funny little flip in my chest, doubly so when I see Elena. The rest of us have moved into the station’s kitchen and grabbed seats at the big round table there, and I had the presence of mind to take two, resting my legs on one of them so Elena’d have a spot next to me. She practically throws herself down into it, and when I look at her I can see the tiredness and worry practically radiating off of her like cartoon stink lines. She glances over at me and offers a perfunctory smile but I know her heart isn’t in it.

I start to ask her whether they found anything, but the Sergeant comes in and tosses a helmet onto the table. It must be Slate’s, I assume; everybody else has theirs. The faceplate is shattered and there’s a vividly bright daub of blood down the front of it.

“We found this,” the Sergeant says, staring at Crookshank, “at the end of the tunnel. No Slate, no nothing. Just this, and a trail of blood leading into a compress arteriole that Slate would never have been able to fit into intact.”

For the past fifteen minutes Crookshank has done nothing but sit there at the table with his head in his hands. Now he raises his head and looks up at the Sergeant. I’ve never seen his face this pale. “It was a Leechman,” he says. “I saw it.”

Instant uproar. A dozen mouths shouting disagreement, disbelief, profanity. Elena is on her feet next to me, staring at Crookshank. “Bullshit,” I think I hear her say. “You fat fucking –“

I can hear Peter saying loudly from a few seats down that he’s seen one, that he knows he’s seen one, and I can hear Fumi saying equally loudly that the Leechman is just a myth, man, grow up, this is bullshit. Amid the noise I meet the Sergeant’s eyes; I haven’t seen or heard him say a single word since Crookshank spoke, but I can tell from his face that a Leechman, whatever the hell that is, is capital-letter Bad News.

I think of something, something I should have thought of immediately. I reach down, plonk my camera on the table in front of me. “I got it on video,” I say, looking around. Nobody hears, not even Elena next to me.

The Sergeant is looking at the camera, then he looks back at me. He frowns. I lick my lips, repeat myself a little louder. “I got it on video,” I say, then I close my eyes and stand up and yell it. I have to yell three times before everyone quiets down and looks at me. “I got it on video,” I say. “Here, look.”

And then I tab through the camera’s menu, find the last video I took, and then set it to play, as everyone crowds around me, craning their necks to get a good look at the unfortunately tiny screen, I feel for just a moment like I might actually be useful for something down here.

I look up again, look at all the faces peering at the camera, held tight to my chest, and when again I lock gazes with the Sergeant I try not to burst into flames from the sheer and incongruous spark of joy-at-belonging that I feel when he gives me a short, curt nod.

Elena’s the first to break the silence that settled in after the video ended. She flops into her seat, looks around at all of us, ends the slow sweep of the circle with her eyes on me. “Well,” she says. “Looks like we’re all fuckin’ dead.”

And I can feel a sudden consuming coldness someplace in my chest snuff out that little fuzzy spark of bucolic, _ya done did good kid_ paternal acceptance when I realize that she’s completely serious.


	8. Chapter 8

May 10, 1984.

_I have been down in the Pit for about two weeks now and I feel as though I am at my wit’s end. Not only have some of these passages collapsed in on themselves but it seems as though this map, which the people at the Natural Resources office assured me was the most up-to-date map of the area they had, is horribly wrong. I keep returning to the same landmarks I have seen a dozen times now, taking passages that the map says ought to lead to the areas I am trying to reach, but I end up right back at the same spot again._

_There are none of the call boxes down here; I am very far off the trail. I have the radio phone that they gave me at the office but I have not tried to use it yet. Even if I did call for help, I doubt that any of the rangers would be able to find their way to me. I have heard stories that even the people who live and work down here get lost more often than not. They don’t like to tell these stories but after having worked with them for so long, you overhear things._

_I am fine on food for now, and if worse comes to worst I can always cook up small hunks of the walls and floors. I know it is frowned upon but I would rather not starve when there is a wealth of food all around me._

_If I don’t return with at least a sample I will be in deep water. I am already on thin ice as it is, so to speak; when I returned from my last expedition the administrator told me that whatever I had done to the copepods had stirred them up something fierce, and that they had already taken three rangers that week. I pretended ignorance but inwardly I was terrified; if he had found out what I knew…_

_Sometimes I think I may be being followed, but I have seen no evidence of it. It is just a feeling. I do my best to laugh it off._

_After all, who would be crazy enough to follow me down here?_

May 12, 1984.

_Made it to the Village but the bridge is out. Spectacular view, a vast churning ocean of acid and various fluids surging out of the orifices above and pounding down the long gullet-like drop below. The Village is taunting me from the other side._

_The metal of the bridge looks befouled somehow. I’m not sure, I have not seen anything like this before. Not rust or corrosion but like the inch-thick metal has been crumpled or wrinkled like the wrapper of a candy bar. The majority of the bridge is simply missing, having probably fallen down into the abyss below. I spent an hour cursing my luck. I will have to turn back._

May 13, 1984.

_Took a triocanth today. Like Rainier said, the meat of its abdomen was savoury, not unlike lobster, but with a faint and offputting aftertaste that became gradually fouler the more I ate. I had to discard the majority of it. I did not need to eat it, I still have some food left, but I wanted to see how bad it would be when I ran out._

_Later in the day I began the ascent back up. I am not entirely empty-handed; I managed to retrieve some of the smaller ‘pearls’ from Oyster’s Shame. Of course they are not pearls at all, more like gallstones, but they are valuable. If you can preserve them they make a perfectly fireproof and perfectly flexible material, and I have heard that ground into a paste they can be used as components in electronics, although I haven’t the faintest idea how exactly that works. I doubt the pearls will be enough, though. If only I could have gotten to the village! I am still cursing my bad luck from the day before. I spent all evening trying to find some way to get across but there were none. It all depended on the bridge and I had not even thought that it might have been destroyed._

_At least the rangers will be glad to know of it; from what I hear they venture down here only rarely._

_Still feel as though I am being followed._

May 16, 1984.

_I am being followed. I’ve seen the man following me, I caught him in the shadow of an ancient, halfway-drained gizzard when I happened to turn around. He was huge, twice as big as I am, and when I called out and shone my light on him he burst apart into a thousand worms or snakes or leeches and they all fled._

_I would have thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me or that my mind was beginning to go but when I made my way back to the spot where the man had stood I found a leech there caught under a fold of flesh that had fallen over on top of it when it had tried to flee. It was nearly the size of my arm, but deflated and wrinkled, with a mouth full of flanged teeth. I hacked it into five pieces but some reflex still allowed it to bite me, albeit shallowly, when I picked it up._

_I thought I had found the way back up but when I checked the map the passage I was in was not there at all. After about five hundred feet of treacherous twists and turns the stents ran out and the passage compressed down to nothing and I had to make my way back. I made a bright fire tonight and did not sleep much._

May 17, 1984.

_I woke at three A.M. to vomit. Pounding headache. Do not feel well. Have rations gone bad?_

May 17, 1984.

_Not the rations. The bite is swollen and infected. I tried to climb further today but was too weak to. My arm feels like it will fall off. Something in the saliva. Why did I pick it up?_

May 17, 1984.

_Saw it again today. It is massive. Came to the edge of my camp and stared at me while I pointed at it with my knife and shouted imprecations. I was delirious._

_It is somewhat like a starfish, in that it forms itself into a five-pointed shape, but it goes upright on two of the ‘legs’ while two others hang by its side and the other stands straight up towards the ceiling. It seems to be composed of thousands of leeches but why they band together in this manner I do not know. It did nothing to me and eventually vanished, but I passed out from the strain soon afterwards and when I came to a few hours later I was not sure if I had really seen it._

_Still feel awful, but not as bad as yesterday. Think I may pull through. I will still have to find some way out of here, but I got here somehow, therefore there must be a way out. I wasn’t able to make it to the village but maybe Rainier and Duke LaVerne will understand._

_I think this will be my last time coming down here. One way or another._

I look up at Elena. “That’s the last one?” I ask her, and she nods.

“That’s all they found at Tim Beaufort’s campsite down there in the Gut. There might have been more but they weren’t able to find it. Or him.”

“So that’s where the story of the Leechman comes from, then?”

“Initially,” she yawns. I close out my wrist screen like she taught me to do and then lean back, glare around the interior of Oyster’s Shame like I’m expecting the Leechman to be standing there in the corner like Mike Myers staring at Laurie Strode or something. “There’ve been other sightings through the years but nothing really concrete. Not that Beaufort’s story is very concrete either, but it was spooky. I’ve always thought it was just the Pit’s version of Bigfoot, just something you scare rookies with.”

I glance over at her. Back inside the station someone bangs into something and curses. Fumi is messing with the stove again but the mood isn’t nearly as jovial as it was before.

The Sergeant’s been trying to get on the radio with Makado for the past couple of hours but there’s some kind of interference. Elena thinks it’s from the nerve clusters surrounding this place; evidently it’s packed full and sometimes when the Pit…thinks too hard? Or something similar, some sort of equivalent, and it blanks out every connection from here to the Village.

Whatever the Village is. I asked Elena but she started a couple of times and then just shook her head. “You’d have to see it to believe it,” she told me, and no matter how much I pestered her she wouldn’t budge, just giving me a secretive little smile and telling me to buzz off and then tickling me when I’d persist.

“Why’re we all dead, Elena?” I ask, after enough silence has passed. The field heating pouch is working on my MRE so I don’t have anything to do at present besides chew on a fairly grainy shelf-stable cracker and watch her eat her goulash. She looks up at me alarmed and gives me a concerned Tim Allen-esque grunt and I can’t help it, I burst out laughing. Everyone looks round at us and I let it fade fast, try not to blush, but then I’m blushing and I feel awful. “I mean,” I say in a low whisper, once everyone’s returned to their meals, “you know how earlier you said that we were all dead? After I showed everybody the video I took? What did you mean?”

“Oh,” Elena waves, taking another bite. “Yeah, that’s just like, part of the myth. Supposedly if the Leechman catches sight of you or gets your scent or however the hell it works, that’s it, it’s going to hunt you down no matter what. No way of stopping it, no nothing. Like Jason.”

“Spooky.”

“So yeah,” Elena smiles, wiggling her fingers at me, warbling her voice. “You’re next, Roan!”

“I take it you don’t think that was a Leechman on the video, then.”

“ _The_ Leechman. There’s only one, supposedly.”

“The Leechman, then.”

“I don’t know what it was,” she says, stabbing at her pouch of food. I’ve just taken mine out of the bag and nearly burned my fingers it was so hot. “It might have been the Leechman, sure. But I think if there was something like that down here, there’d have been footage of it before today.”

“There’s not?”

“There is _one_ grainy photograph, that’s it.”

I think about that for a while, roll it around in my head like a particularly distasteful morsel of food that I know I have to eat.

Well, Roan, break it down. What if it’s true? What if there really is a giant monster made out of leeches stomping around out there and it’s going to come for you and that’s that, nothing to be done about it?

I almost, _almost_ shove it out of my mind and forget about it, don’t even bother to entertain the notion, but I catch myself, force myself to feel that heady quake of fear that I feel rising up my throat like a hot flash when I realize that I don’t _want_ to die, that for all of my bluster and bravado, for all of my playacting by taking up chain-smoking and coming down to Gumption on a damn-fool errand, I don’t want to die.

It’s a new feeling and not one I enjoy. It makes me feel weak. When I felt like I was hollow I think I also felt stronger.

“There something wrong with your MRE?” Elena asks, and I frown, look over at her.

“What?”

“You were just giving it a very strange face,” she says, gesturing with her fork.

“Oh,” I roll my eyes. “It’s nothing.”

“You sure?” she asks. “You’re acting –“

I reach over and squeeze her knee gently. “Don’t you worry about me, alright?”

“I’ve been doing nothing but,” she says, and I smile at her and start to say something else, when the Sergeant comes walking out of the station behind us and gestures at me.

“Merriweather,” he says, in a surprisingly calm tone of voice, “I’ve got Miss Veret on the line finally, she wants to speak with you.”

“With me?” I blurt, while Elena studiously avoids my gaze. I haven’t really prodded at it but I don’t want to push my luck with her concession about not rocking the boat until the mission’s over. She’s still quietly furious at both Peter and Makado; I’ve caught her staring at Peter several times, something close to hate in her eyes. Well, maybe that’s being melodramatic. She blames him, though, I’m certain of it, and I – well, I don’t blame her.

The Sergeant ushers me in to the back room – I can’t stop myself from glancing over at the lumpy mass in the corner, trail of blood still leading to it, now hidden beneath an emergency blanket – and holds out a wired phone receiver to me. Immediately a blast of static assaults my ears and I jerk the handset back, but then I can hear Makado’s voice and the static quiets.

“Makado?” I ask. I see the Sergeant’s eyes narrow fractionally as he registers that I’ve called her by her first name but I turn away from him, lean up against the wall.

“Hey, Roan,” she says. She’s put on a brisk, clipped tone but her voice is full of concern. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. There’s a lot going on down here, though.”

“Trust me, I know,” she groans. “We hadn’t heard from the Listening Station in a while but that’s normal, the electrical disturbances in the area can sometimes cut off communications, so nobody here had thought anything of it. I’m going to have to fill out a lot of forms in triplicate tonight. But you’re fine?”

“Yeah, yeah, nothing happened to me, I’m okay.”

“Okay, good. I, uh.”

I frown, glance down at the handset. It isn’t like her to prevaricate. “I wanted to call you first because the situation is evolving up here just as much as it is down there and…the mission might become more dangerous than I’d initially anticipated.”

“What are you saying?”

“I can get you out of there,” she tells me, and it’s like I’ve been hit by a bullet, like I’ve been electrified. I look up at the Sergeant without even meaning to and his face is as unreadable as a bare concrete wall. “But you’d have to leave _now_ ,” Makado tells me, ploughing through my moment of stunned confusion. “If you wait much longer I don’t know if I’ll be able to get you out.”

I open my mouth and close it again. I let the seconds roll on so long that Makado says my name again, voice hesitant, as though she’s afraid we’ve lost connection. “I’m still here,” I breathe. I close my eyes. “If I say yes, could you get anybody else out?” I ask her. “One of the other rangers, I mean.”

“No,” Makado says. “I need all of them down there. You can hand off the camera to someone else, I know it’s your camera but I’ll buy you a new one like I said.”

“Definitely not?”

“Huh? Oh, as far as someone else coming out? Yeah, I can’t. Don’t worry, I’ll be here tracking you on the map and I’ll be able to talk you through the way out.”

I smile faintly. “That’s really kind of you, Makado, but I’m staying.”

There’s a moment of frozen silence before I hear Makado cough. “You’re staying?” she asks, and I nod.

“I’m not a quitter. I appreciate it, I really do, but I’m going to see this through.”

I hear her sigh over the line, a whispery gust barely distinguishable from the interference surrounding it. “Well,” she says, “I guess I underestimated you.”

“I’m used to it.”

She starts to say something, then stops, and I smile a little to myself and cut her off. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m okay down here.”

“You’re…doing better?”

“Yeah. I, ah…took a little field trip the other day. Felt a little better afterwards.”

The Sergeant gives me a dubious look but I ignore him.

“All the more reason to get out while you can,” she says, “but I guess you’re determined. Well, I – I admire your character. Jesus Christ,” she laughs, “listen to me, I’m losing it in my old age. Good for you. Don’t die down there, alright?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Yes,” she says softly, “I imagine you will. Can you put Mr. Van Der Leeuwen back on the phone, please?”

“Who?” I blurt, before my eyes flick over to the Sergeant and I realize. I smile at him and I am only a little shocked when he smiles back. “Oh,” I say, “right.”

“See you.”

“You as well,” I tell her, and then I pass it back to the Sergeant and wander back out of the station, feeling like there are wings spreading behind me and trailing dust on all the surfaces as they squeeze through, feeling, infinitesimally and unplaceably, as though the Roan of even just three days ago would have jumped at the offer not quite before it cleared Makado’s lips.

Elena’s finished her meal by now and has mine sitting idly on her lap, saving it for me probably, and when she hears my footsteps behind her she leans around and cranes her neck up at me and then nearly does a double-take. I smile at her and ask what the matter is and she just says that I look happy, and when she says that it’s all I can do to stop myself from leaning down and taking her head in my hands and kissing her long and hard and slow right there.

“I am happy,” I tell her, plopping myself down next to her on the stairs and squeezing her tightly for a moment, just a moment – even if what Slate said the other day was true and we weren’t being as inconspicuous as I’d hoped, I still don’t want to make a production out of it. Not in public, anyway.

Oh, poor Slate. He’d begun to grow on me, he really had. It’s a weird feeling, knowing that he’s gone now, that the guy who was flirting with me three days ago and grinning at me just earlier while we all swapped stories just…disappeared, without even a body. Nothing besides a bloodstained helmet.

Now Elena asks me why I’m happy and I tell her briefly what Makado had told me, and Elena’s face brightens immeasurably. “Oh, thank god,” she groans. “You’re getting out of here? You’re going to be safe?”

“I – what – no,” I tell her, spluttering a little, “I told her no, I said I wanted to stay down here. I asked her if I could get someone to come out with me and she said no, so I told her I was going to stay. You’re not smiling,” I observe, stupidly. She’s staring at me, mouth slightly open.

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Roan,” she says, starting to get up before she remembers the tray of food on her lap. She settles for just twisting around and pointing back at the station. “Go back in there while she’s still on the phone and tell her you’ve changed your mind!” she hisses at me.

“What?” I blurt, and then realize everyone’s looked round and lower my voice “Are you crazy?” I ask her.

“Are _you?_ ”

“Elena, I – I thought you’d be happy!”

“You thought I would be _happy_? Happy that you’re choosing to stay here, in danger, just so you can spend a little more time with me? The thing that’d make me happiest, Roan,” she says, reaching up to stroke my cheek, “is if I _knew_ for a fact you were up there waiting for me, not hanging around down here where you’re liable to get eaten or dissolved or spiked or skewered or what the hell ever else. If I _knew_ I would be coming back to you and that you’d be safe and sound.”

I have, I realize, at some point during that little speech, bitten my lip hard enough to leave a mark. She looks at me with mixed mournfulness and resignation and finally I manage to unstick my jaw long enough to offer a plaintive and unsatisfactory “oh,” and Elena laughs.

“This is pointless,” she murmurs. Her eyes are flicking over my face and for a moment I want so badly that it’s painful to know what she sees when she looks at me. “You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?”

I nod, slowly. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I didn’t think –“

“You stop that,” she says, prodding me in the ribs with a sly smile. I yelp and cover my mouth reflexively, glaring daggers at her, but her smile latches on to me and then I’m grinning back at her like a damn fool. “Stop being sorry for shit like that,” she tells me, a little more seriously.

“But you’re going to worry about me,” I point out. “About if I’ll die down here.”

“Anything that’s going to want to kill you has got to go through me first,” she says, and I open my mouth to tell her – well, I don’t know what I wanted to tell her.

The door behind us bangs open and I jump. “Everybody into the meeting room!” he calls, and then me and Elena share a glance and file in along with everyone else.

“Hi guys,” Makado says, voice crackly on speakerphone, once the Sergeant’s confirmed that everyone’s inside. What passes next is about an hour of the dullest game of verbal chicken I’ve ever had the misfortune to be witness to. Makado is trying desperately to convince the team to keep on going, down to the barrows to get the crystal and then back up, and something about the subtle and quiet note of underlying nerves in her voice makes me realize something – she really doesn’t have any power over us.

I mean, think about it – what would she do if we all decided that we had had enough, that we weren’t going to go through with it, that we were just going to make our way back up to the surface and hit the canteen? She’d be furious, of course, she’d be beyond pissed at the team, but it isn’t like they were doing anything illegal. This is a company now, they’d get fired and life would move on. Maybe they wouldn’t even get fired; someone like Elena, for instance, someone with cave diving and rescue skills, would probably be impossible to promptly replace, if at all – maybe the Pit pays well, better than a place like the Coast Guard would, but you’d also have to find the people who can cave dive _and_ don’t mind operating inside of a living nightmare like the Pit. Cuts an already slim pool in half, or more.

I think I understand now why Makado’s seemed always to behave so chummily with the people nominally under her command, something I’d noticed up on the surface; the few times she’d come to visit us in the barracks she was welcomed like one of the rangers, like a favorite boss who doesn’t rock the boat very much. It’s because as soon as the team is down here, doing something important, every decision from above becomes a negotiation instead of just an order to be obeyed.

And it also makes more sense to me why the Sergeant is such a hardass – if he’s the bad cop to Makado’s good cop, the people on the team are more likely to listen to her, just cause she’s more sympathetic – and then, double-duty, while they’re down here and under his command directly, they’re more likely to do what he says without any argument because they don’t want him pissed off at them.

Right now, though, it looks as though the Sergeant isn’t entirely holding up his end of the deal. He’s stood there like a statue for the last half an hour, only disappearing for a little bit towards the beginning to grab himself a cup of coffee, not uttering a word, his granite-like expression not cracking, not even a little. He ought to be cracking down on the dissent that’s being thrown her way but he’s not, he’s just letting Ellis and Fumi and Crookshank practically demand to know what is so goddam important about this fucking crystal that it was worth Slate dying for, and it’s got Makado in a bind because she very, very clearly does not want to tell us. She talks around it, never flat-out saying that she won’t but avoiding it. This goes on for a while until Crookshank, fuming, slams his hand on the table, making me jump. Elena, who’s been holding my hand in both of hers in her lap, glances over at me and squeezes my hand lightly, and when our eyes meet she smiles faintly.

“Makado,” Crookshank says, in a surprisingly level tone of voice, “if you can’t tell us what’s important about this crystal, we’re not going to get it for you.”

It _would_ be Crookshank that put voice to it that baldly, but as I look around the table I see slow nods. “Yeah,” Fumi says, and although many of us glance over at the Sergeant, he remains silent.

Makado sighs and in it I can hear a note of defeat, trickling down plainly through however many hundreds of feet and flesh and rock.

“Alright,” she says softly.

The crystal is important, she says, because in the 2007 disaster the thing that they used to make the Pit stop from waking up entirely was an array of three carved crystals that had been found back in the 70s at the original Indian ritual grounds, and it had been determined through rigorous and secretive testing that striking the carved crystals produced vibrations of a certain wavelength impossible to replicate by any other means that exerted some sort of influence or control over the Pit. Striking them in a certain way could make it wake up, striking them in another way could make it convulse, and so on. These crystals had been incorporated into some sort of machine that was supposed to, if there ever was a disaster as serious as the one in 2007, spin the crystals up and strike a certain tone that would have been loud enough to pound downwards into whatever the Pit used for a brain and get it to go into a coma, or to kill it – they weren’t entirely sure.

The plan had worked, though not without a few hiccups, Makado says, but the biggest hiccup of all was that the crystals had shattered when that tone was struck, and since then this is the first time they’ve had one within their grasp. If they can get the crystal, get it up to the lab and carve it out the way the natives of the area must have, thousands if not tens of thousands of years ago, they might have another ace in the hole in case the Pit starts to wake up again.

“Because,” Makado says, “I’m not going to sugarcoat this – it is going to. We’ve been hearing rumblings, down there in the depths, in the Gut and elsewhere, muscle contractions, palpitations, activity in areas that have lain dormant since 2007. I’ve been speaking to Science and their opinion is that the Pit is building up a tolerance to the sedative we use, and without that, all the other measures, the deliberate starving, nerve clipping, muscle relaxants – they won’t be enough to stop something like 2007, or something worse, from happening again.”

I hear her blow out a big breath.

“I don’t know what it’ll be like if it wakes up again. You all know that the Pit’s too big to be ambulatory, but it’s got appendages it can move and feed with, and its size makes it a threat to a very big chunk of Texas if it were to be able to move them with coordination. Thanks to us, if it wakes up again, it’ll be _hungry_. You decide if it’s worth it.”

The line clicks off and we sit there in silence for a moment. The Sergeant levers himself off the wall and plonks his empty mug down on the table. “Think about it,” he says to all of us. “We’ll sleep here tonight and then tomorrow we’ll make a decision.”

So we sleep there tonight and tomorrow we make a decision. Despite the dead body in the Station nothing comes poking around to bother us, or at least if anything does it took one look at Joker and scampered off. Elena and I stay up for a little but again we find that there’s little to say; I content myself with stroking my hands along the naked expanse of her body, not in a sexual way, just because I like the way her skin feels beneath my fingertips, while she held very still, a ghost of a smile fluttering over her lips. I find her hips and squeeze them, trace circles around her nipples, run my hand down the toned flat expanse of her belly, the dark patch of stubble below beckoning me, but I control myself. I stare at it for a moment, then flick my eyes up to her face, to her unruly mop of blonde hair.

Elena shifts her hands along my backside, squeezing at me, and I make a little noise deep in my throat, and then she grins. “You’re like a cat,” she tells me. It’s the first thing either of us have spoken in about a half an hour. Her other hand is tucked up beneath me and tangled in my hair. I lean in and kiss her.

“Do you dye your hair?” I ask her, and she laughs.

“That’s such a random question.”

“I was curious.”

“I do,” she says.

“Why?”

“Cause I don’t like brown,” she says primly. I arch an eyebrow at her.

“I have brown hair,” I point out, and she smiles, looks up at it.

“Yes, you do. But it looks good on you.”

“I think you’d look good with brown hair.”

“We should go to sleep,” she tells me. I pull her closer against me, knocking against one of the tent’s metal support struts with my elbow.

“Shit,” I grunt, and she laughs.

We say a few more things but nothing important. I kiss her on the neck and she giggles, and then we fall asleep, arms and legs tangled together like knots. I was afraid I’d dream but instead there was nothing, not even a sensation that I had dreamed and forgotten it as soon as I’d woken, just closing my eyes and then opening them when Elena had sat up, the alarm on her watch beeping at us. I looked at the shifting muscles in her back, at the long thin scar along one of her shoulder blades, and then I reached out for her and pulled her back down into me and nuzzled my face all along the soft, smooth places of her body and she kept laughing and saying that we had to get up, that it was going to be a long day, but I told her that if that was the case we ought to make the most of our morning, and she considered that and then turned with a feral grin and fell on me and all was well for a while.

Then, when we were through, we got dressed and clambered out of the tent and found that a consensus had been reached without us, although it was one we’d agreed with – that if Slate’s (presumed) death, and the (presumed) deaths of the other four people who worked at the Deep Listening Station, and the (definite) death of the one we’d found were to mean anything, were to be _worth it_ – I felt something like a shudder at that phrase, at the notion of a death like that being ‘worth it’ – we would have to continue. If it was as important as Makado said, we would have to continue. And when the Sergeant told us this, that we’d been outvoted anyway but that, nodding to me, if I wanted to take Makado’s offer up anyway, she’d informed him that she’d be able to guide me up out of the darkness, and that nobody here would think anything less of me for taking the easy way out.

And then I looked at Elena and she’d looked at me, and I thought I saw something imploring in her eyes, so I looked away from her, but I couldn’t say anything to him, not just yet, because I knew that we were going to make it to the barrows today and some freakish mortal fear had taken ahold of me and its teeth were so deep and cold and serrated that I didn’t trust myself to speak. I thought of the stories Peter and Makado had told me, I thought of poor Eileen, dragged off by a copepod, and for a moment I wanted so badly to say yes, okay, tap me out, I’m done, you guys have fun down here, but it passed quickly and replaced itself with something hard and cast-iron and _heavy_ sinking into the pit of my stomach. It took me a moment to recognize it as determination, and then I was smiling at the Sergeant, I imagine rather beatifically.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Positive. Why dip out when it’s just getting exciting?”

And with that, after a little more puttering around and making sure everyone was collected and on the ball with what was to be done today, we took the second-largest vent out of Oyster’s Shame, leaving its spongy and beautiful luminescence behind, leaving the dead body behind, leaving, I certainly hoped, the Leechman behind, and began the long, slow, treacherous climb downwards to the copepod barrows.


	9. Chapter 9

The Sergeant sprays me down next and I keep my mouth shut and breathe shallowly through my nose, but the same raw chemical odor still forces its fingers down my throat and makes my guts churn. I cough and the Sergeant gives me a rough smile that says something like ‘grin and bear it, soldier,’ and then he’s done and moving on to Klaus.

Ahead of us is the gate to the copepod barrows, a vast wall of metal set directly into the flesh of the Pit, with one of the ubiquitous submarine-style doors and a host of warnings slathered over the it in bright, eye-catching shades. One warns of hostile arthropods ahead and that the buddy system is mandatory; another warns that the barrows are not area mapped and to exercise caution; another states that free fire is authorized and encourages rangers within to double-check their ID tags and to make sure they check their targets; a third states in bold letters that it is a felony for both civilians and non-combat-trained park personnel to enter, punishable by a fine of up to $1000, imprisonment, and administrative penalty, if applicable. A fourth states that there is nothing beyond this point worth dying for and practically begs the reader not to enter. The paint on this last example is peeling and the latter half of it looks stained by some kind of ichor.

My heart, which has been residing comfortably in my throat this past hour or so, does an ugly little squeeze and for a moment I feel somewhat faint, but I close my eyes and focus on the pounding in my ears and the feeling passes after a moment. I still have the tingles of anticipation racing up and down my arms, and my hands are quivering, though I can’t tell whether it’s out of fear or out of adrenaline overload.

Elena sneezes again next to me and I look over at her, then lean in. I know I shouldn’t ask, I know it’s practically pointless because the answer is obligatory, but I ask her anyway: “Are – are we going to be okay in there?”

Elena shrugs and looks at me with bleary eyes. “We’ll be fine,” she assures me, but there is an edge of tension in her voice that tells me the real answer isn’t nearly so cut and dried. “We have an…understanding with the copepods. We don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with us. Plus the pheromone spray will make us smell really unappetizing.”

“Even when we march right in and bother them?”

“When there’s this many of us they’ll think twice about starting anything.”

I neglect to mention that that cuts both ways. Or any of the other dozen holes in that logic that I can see. What if a copepod isn’t as smart as we are and thinks it can just scuttle up and grab one of us? Then one of us shoots it and they all take that as the signal to go ham on us? How smart are copepods anyway?

I swallow hard and push it out of my mind. Between the pheromone spray that the Sergeant is treating all of us with, including Joker, and Elena’s assurance that they do this all the time and it’s only somewhat dangerous, I am almost able to delude myself into thinking that we’ll be okay.

No, stop that. No negative thinking. These men and women (okay, well, woman) do this for a living and they’re paid very highly for what they do. If they say it’s safe, it’s surely safe.

 _Alright_ , says the little voice, whispering from its burrow at the back of my skull, _let’s just ignore the fact that everyone has gotten very tight-lipped and anxious the closer we got to this place, let’s just ignore that everyone has triple-checked their rifles while we’ve been standing here, let’s just ignore –_

Yes, I think savagely to myself, let’s just ignore all that. This is what you wanted, Roan, isn’t it, exhilaration and dangerous circumstances, right? This is the logical extension of chain-smoking, just more immediate. What would be worse, a death in twenty years of lung cancer or a death right now by disembowelment and then getting eaten alive by an arthropod? If you weren’t _stupid_ enough to believe Thor when he told you that –

Elena squeezes my hand, interrupting my internal monologue, and then the foot-thick reinforced door to the barrows is swinging open at the Sergeant’s hand, and I have no more time for thoughts.

“Stick very close to me,” Elena reminds me, and I nod, not trusting myself to speak. There is a cold sweat along the back of my neck and I ball up the loose rubberized fabric at my thighs to keep my hands from shuddering.

One by one we file into the barrows, and then the Sergeant seals the door behind us, trapping us inside. All around me I hear sounds of slug rifle actions being racked and shells being chambered. I see Euler, just a few feet away, swallowing hard, pressing rarely used buttons on the controller, and see Joker, correspondingly, flash on a pair of headlights and unsling its rifle from around its shoulders, tossing the meter-long gunmetal rod around like it were a toy.

I look around at the barrows and to my immense surprise my initial reaction is disappointment. I guess I had anticipated surroundings even stranger than the rest of the Pit, something _really_ weird to mark that we’re in the part of the map where the optimistic medieval cartographer would draw sea serpents rather than blank space, but the flesh on the inside of the vast stainless surgical-steel retaining wall is just as rugose and squamous and eldritch as the flesh on the outside. If the wall and all of the warning signs plastered rather tackily all over it weren’t in the way you practically wouldn’t be able to tell that you’d crossed over the boundary into The Forbidden Zone.

Here be monsters and so on. None are immediately forthcoming, however, and the Sergeant resumes his spot at the head of the column and takes out the slim palm-pilot-like locator device keyed to the tracker on the crystal and points towards one of the dripping orifices leading deeper within, and where he points we follow.

There’s something meaningful there, I think to myself, as my boots squelch against the vast living floor and my eyes scrape along the edges of the vast living walls and my nose inhales the reek of the vast living space I’m crawling through like a parasite. Because truly there likely is no real meaningful boundary between the barrows and the rest of the Pit, it’s just a place the copepods like to nest. Perhaps it’s got the perfect temperature for them or it has an abundance of food or it has – some other quality that they desire more than other parts. But, I think as I crane my neck back and glare at the wall receding into the darkness behind us, that boundary there certainly wouldn’t have been one they would have picked.

Or perhaps I’m anthropomorphizing too much. Perhaps the copepods wouldn’t have _picked_ anything, perhaps their range is the same as the range of their tinier oceangoing fellows, spreading wherever they might and if the surroundings aren’t suitable to support their life, they die.

I remember Peter’s tale of the copepod that wanted to see the sunlight and wonder, and then fifteen minutes later I see my first copepod and the sight of the massive crustacean shatters whatever pondering introspectiveness that I had summoned to, I realize now, shield me from the brutality I had been anticipating.

The copepod, at any rate, was small, at least according to Elena. I had underestimated their bulk, just based off of Peter’s story. This one was the size, perhaps, of a smallish boat, and streamlined roughly the same, a bulbous cigar-like body tapering at both ends to a tail and to a head, with a pair of reticulated arms terminating in creepy little hands with long grasping fingers. Something about their five-fingered familiarity filled me with dread, and watching the way the copepod cocked its head at us from the warty, encrusted protuberance it had partially emerged from, I thought I could have detected a canniness to it that shattered my half-conceived notion of the copepods as being simply overgrown louses or similar. It was, I realized, _sizing us up_.

Evidently we were present in numbers large enough to prove unpalatable, for it retreated back into its hole with a squelching noise like a fart and let us be. I breathed out a sigh of relief when it went and Elena squeezed my hand.

My initial impressions were wrong, anyway, because the deeper we go the more the flesh around us seems to crinkle and whorl and shrink down, without really losing any volume or pressing down further against us, without restricting our movement overly compared to the flesh outside. It’s as though this portion of the Pit were, for whatever reason, much _older_ than the rest, although that doesn’t really make any sense, and what I’m seeing are all the assorted wrinkles and liver spots and jaundices that would come from that age. It sags in here, the ceiling bulges downwards and blisters occasionally, wet and fragile-looking and dripping in places. I think I can smell ballast and I discover that that night only – Christ, only a _day_ ago, had imprinted something indelible and Pavlovian into me, for with the smell of the ballast I only felt my knees weaken slightly and my pulse quicken whenever I glanced at Elena, which was frequently.

Encounters with copepods become gradually more common the deeper we press. We see them all over the place, great overgrown louses burrowing amid the flesh, peeking out at us blearily or waving their rotund abdomens as they struggle, pale and phallic, to force themselves into reluctantly elastic orifices. Many times they look at us, eyes like faceted obsidian paperweights sunk in their broad, plated skulls, and I feel the same eerie sense of _sizing up_ that I had noticed before, the same sense of _analysis_ , but not a single one of them even makes a move in our direction.

Two hours in I incline my head closer to Elena and ask her how smart these things are, really, and she shrugs, her shoulder nudging at my chin. “I don’t think anyone really _knows_ ,” she says, “but the conventional wisdom is that they’re about as smart as five-year-olds.”

I think about that, really think about it, about what that implies. I remember being five; I was conscious and functional, if a little stupid and naïve. I couldn’t have fended for myself but I was also a soft, coddled human child, not an arthropod the size of a truck. I know cockatoos and dolphins are about as smart as three-year-olds, I know that some cephalopods like cuttlefish are supposed to be rather intelligent as well.

Maybe it’s too much of an abstraction. Saying something is as smart as a five-year-old implies a number of things and invites the listener to imagine various things that are true about five-year-olds that might not necessarily be true about the animal in question. Perhaps a copepod is only as smart as a five-year-old in certain areas, like in recognizing itself in a mirror or foraging for food or in performing certain types of logic puzzles. Perhaps –

“You okay?” Elena asks me, and I realize I’m doing it again, I’m retreating into myself as a sort of anticipatory cringe. The air is electric in here and though nothing has happened so far some deep-seated monkey part of my brain knows that we are in a capital-letter Bad Place with Bad Things in it that want to do Bad Acts to my poor little monkey body, and if I go analytical, if I shove all of my thought into the high-level abstract end of the spectrum maybe it won’t hurt so bad when I’m being eaten alive.

 _Stop. Here and now, Roan_ , I tell myself. _Psychoanalyze yourself later_.

Elena nudges me and repeats herself and I realize with a kind of aching clarity that I am very, perhaps mortally frightened, and when I look at her all that I want, all that I _need_ , on some kind of overpowering molecular level, is for her to hold me very tightly until this is all over. I think my lip even trembles a little, and I can tell from the tiny judder in her eye when it does that she notices. I don’t even have the presence of mind to curl my lip at myself at this effervescent and overly enthusiastic gesture of weakness. I must be losing my touch.

Elena takes a hand off her rifle and knits her gloved fingers awkwardly with mine, and then she does something with her radio and then I can hear her, as close and as clear as if she were inside my helmet with me.

“Roan,” she says, adding quickly that this is one-way only, some sort of ranger trick with the equipment that would take me too long or be too technical to replicate on my end, “I know you’re scared but you’ve been so strong so far and I’m so proud of you. I – “ she says, and then she breaks off for a moment, and I recognize in the silence a kind of precipice that she is dangling off of and she doesn’t know for a moment whether or not to let go or to pull herself back up. I’m smiling, I’m staring at her and I’m smiling and willing her to just tell me, to open up and say whatever it is she wanted to say, to not _think_ for just a moment, but when she speaks again I can see that she brought herself back from it and is taking a more measured approach, she is looking before she leaps, which although reasonable leaves me aching with the desire to hold her, to put my hand to her cheek and tell her that no matter what she wanted to say to me I would have wanted to hear it.

“I am so glad,” she says finally, “that I kissed you, I’m so glad that all of this happened between us, and I’m not going to let anything happen to you down here. I promise.”

And then I reach over and slip my arm around her hip and tug her into me and although I cannot really tell her how I feel without clunking my helmet against hers and yelling I think she gets the idea that I do feel better.

We spend the next half hour or so with her radio still linked up to mine and with her low voice like cool water whispering comforting, sensual things directly into my ears, and though more copepods – or perhaps just a rotating menagerie of the same five or so, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference – come and inspect us warily from a safe distance, clinging to the walls and prodding their heads out of vents as we pass, I manage not to feel too frightened of them.

Elena tells me about herself, about the year she spent in France after she graduated high school and her parents still thought she was going to go to college, about the time she broke a rib from laughing too hard, about the time that she got into a car accident and it turned out to be an ex-boyfriend that she had rear-ended and they ended up getting back together and he rear-ended her, and she says this last with a lascivious little grin I can hear very clearly and it both makes me picture it and bite my lip a little and makes me snicker because it is the dumbest way to refer to sex that I’ve ever heard, and I realize that it has been far, far too long since I’ve had a _friend_ like this, someone who’s been willing to expose at least a little of their life to me without heavy editing getting in the way. I learn that she drinks but not heavily, that she likes the taste of whiskey but doesn’t like how drunk it gets her, that she tried to smoke a cigarette once and vomited all over her shoes and has never been able to smell cigarette smoke without feeling vaguely nauseous afterwards. I learn that she likes jazz music and blues music and that one of her favorite musicians is Dave van Ronk but that she also (she admits with a wry little shake of her head) likes pop music and that she also feels vaguely ashamed of it whenever she looks at the small stack of CDs she keeps with her things back in the barracks. I learn that Fall Out Boy and Green Day have made the list, along with some Coltrane and Louis Armstrong, but also Five Iron Frenzy and Cold War Kids and Florence and the Machine and Queens of the Stone Age and Pearl Jam.

She tells me about how when she was a kid she wanted to be a figure skater and trained for so long and so hard but she didn’t have enough talent to really do it at a meaningful level, and her dream was always to go to the Olympics for it but it was something that she had leave behind, and she had ended up channeling that competitiveness and drive and motivation into diving instead and found that she was good at it, that she was beyond good at it, that she found a freedom there underwater that she hadn’t expected, and she had grabbed it like a quarterback and ran with it until she had ended up here.

She tells me about high school, how she was one of the lacrosse girls, and instantly I ache for her in a way that’s almost palpable, because one of my first real crushes on a girl had been in the senior year of high school, and every day I would walk across the bridge to the cafeteria at the same time that she was coming back with a group of her friends, wearing that blazing maroon and white oversized polo shirts that I found so indelibly attractive, and it had awoke something in me that had apparently decided afterwards to fall back asleep afterwards, with mild snoring in college, until it finally decided to burst out of bed roughly four days ago at 2 PM in the metaphorical afternoon with a panicked look at the alarm clock.

There is a lull in the one-sided conversation for a moment and I look over at her wondering if something is wrong but I catch her staring at me with an abundantly warm look of open fondness on her face that immediately pushes a rising heat into my cheeks and makes me look away quickly.

She tells me that she likes my body, that she knows I think I’m too skinny and frail and what the hell ever else I think is wrong with me but she thinks my face and my big wonky Roman nose is terrifically aesthetic. She loves the little dimples I have just above my ass, and she loves my ass and the way I make a little animal grunting noise in my throat whenever she squeezes or spanks it. She loves the way that I’m so thin that she can wrap both her arms around me and hold me very tight and feel me wriggle against her. She loves the way that I nuzzle against her in my sleep and the way that, occasionally, she’s noticed, I mumble things and give her affectionate, drunken kisses without ever waking up, and then press myself back into her bosom and settle down again. She loves the way I cry out softly when I come and dig my nails into her without meaning to, and she loves the way that my tongue knows exactly what to do when I lap at her. She loves how I taste and how I smell and even though it’s been a couple days of hard work and neither of us are particularly fresh as daisies at the present moment she’s loved giving me impromptu baths with wet-wipes so she has another excuse to cup my small breasts and watch my cheeks color when her thumb and forefinger come together on my small, sensitive nipples. She likes the way that I’m more passive than she is, that she gets a chance to “be the man” for once and take charge, she likes the way that I look at her when her hand is squeezing gently around my throat, the way my mouth drops halfway open and I practically start to pant I want it so bad.

Halfway through this list I had begun to feel embarrassed, but I’ve wrapped all the way around and ended up feeling fuzzy and clear and incredibly, incredibly warm.

She has a whole litany of these things that she loves about me and I end up grinning so widely as she recites them to me, her tone growing slowly more and more pleased as she does so, that I flash a copepod a dazzling smile from about thirty feet away and I amuse myself by imagining that it looks confused as it turns and thrusts itself back into the flesh of the wall.

I wish I had some adequate way to tell her that nobody, not even Thor, has ever done anything like this for me. Nobody’s ever recognized that I was frightened and out of my element and distracted me so organically and effortlessly that I didn’t even realize at first, and by the time I did I was too flattered to care. I settle for just holding here there to me and listening to her voice as we pry deeper into the Pit, into the barrows.

With my hand there on the gentle swell of Elena’s hip and the crook of her elbow nestled tight against my side, the rifle clanking lightly in a rhythmic pattern as we walk, it is easy enough to forget that we are all presently in mortal danger.

* * *

We’ve stopped now, in the middle of a broad flat chamber that throbs like a drum to a sickly organic beat coming from somewhere below. It feels like walking on a waterbed. The Sergeant is stopped there ahead of us, staring at the locator PDA clutched in his gloved palm with a curious expression that on any lesser man I would categorize as either chagrin or hesitance, but either of those would be frightfully out of place on the Sergeant so I simply assume that it’s some trick of the light bouncing off the glass of the faceplate masking his characteristically immobile face.

I watch as he reaches down to the radio at his waist. “Veret,” he says, his voice faint and crackly in my helmet, “the Big Guy has it.”

He says this improbable phrase with such complete nonchalance that I think initially that I must have misheard him. Then the radio sparks and Makado’s voice, equally grainy, blooms in my ears. “Shit,” she says, dead serious. “Are you sure?”

“Locator’s pointing right to it.”

“I wish we had _fucking_ known –“

“No time,” the Sergeant growls curtly. “Can we go in?”

Dead silence for a moment. It stretches like taffy. I glance over at Elena; she looks concerned, but whatever line Makado is speaking on has overridden the link that Elena had rigged between us. Her lips move softly and then she shakes her head.

“Alright,” Makado says, “go in.”

The Sergeant waits a full fifteen seconds before he acknowledges the order and then gestures to the rest of us and we trundle ahead towards the puckered vent ahead of us. It’s narrow, so narrow that we have to get out the jack again, the lower-powered spare one we had to take from the storage locker in the Listening Station after Slate had disappeared with the big fuck-off high-power hydraulic one strapped to his back.

Poor Slate, I think to myself again, standing there feeling nervous and edgy here at the back of the pack, with only Elena and Joker there to protect me. What if a copepod scoots in, those manic rows of frilled rudders on its sides working overtime, and scoops me up in one of those creepy little hands, big enough to encircle my entire waist in one palm but spindly and altogether too delicate-looking to really embody the force and power I know is lurking behind them?

I consider the copepod behind us just now, thirty feet back and pale in the wan spotlight Joker is casting on it. The robot’s walking backward with inhuman surety, the slug rifle clutched in its metallic hands in a relaxed, low posture, but with the barrel still trained on the enormous arthropod back there with unerring accuracy. I look at the copepod’s massive blunt head and its dark, dark eyes, and it looks at me. It seems as though it had intended to come this way. It’s holding something in one of its hands but it’s tucked up against its body and I can’t really get a good look at it.

The copepod puts one hand out in front of it and pushes off and with a sort of bulky, lumbering grace retreats back out of sight and is gone. I let out a sigh of relief I didn’t realize I was holding.

Elena’s helmet clunks into mine. “It’ll be okay,” she says, a little brusquely, and then she’s gone, marching up to the front at some unseen signal from the Sergeant. Me and Euler are left to trade glances; he looks nervous, but he also always looks nervous.

I feel the temptation to retreat into myself again but I resist it. I grin at Euler, widely, with more carelessness than I really feel, and he frowns at me. He looks as though he’s going to be sick.

“Euler,” I say to him, leaning in a little. “I don’t know about you but this makes me feel alive.”

“Very invigorating,” he agrees after a moment, in a very drab tone of voice. His accent’s slipped a little, he’s got a little trace of the German coming out in the consonants now.

“You all right?” I ask him, and he shrugs.

“The sooner we can get out of here, the better.”

“What, you’re not a fan of the surroundings?” I ask. I can feel a laugh at the back of my throat. I gesture around us, at the fleshy walls wreathed in shadow. “The scenic views? The locals?” I ask, eyeing the silhouette of a copepod scrambling along the ceiling far in the distance. It appears as nothing more than a great white tick rooting amid the remains of a piece of intestine someone has tossed on the ground in the middle of the night, lit briefly by our flashlights and then winking out of existence again. I experience a brief moment of nausea as the perspective seems to shift around me and I have to blink hard and stare at the floor to regain my bearings.

“We’re going in,” the Sergeant says across the radio. I stand on my tiptoes – not an easy feat in the heavy cleats – and peer ahead. The vent ahead takes a sharp curve to the left and – my breath catches – I can see an eerie, faint green glow emanating from it, the color of will-o-wisps and phosphorescence, the strength of about a hundred fireflies put together and flickering their hardest. It casts crazy shadows over the folds and flaps and moles and wrinkles of flesh on the walls, but we march around the corner just the same. I nearly plough into Fumi; I didn’t realize he’d stopped short, and he reaches back awkwardly and steadies me. Next to me I hear Euler mutter something under his breath in German and I frown and look over at him sharply but he is staring at something ahead of us.

I look ahead and see that we have fanned out into a rough semi-circle, and there in the center of the chamber, peering at us dubiously with an uncannily aggrieved expression on its flat, cracked face, is an absolutely enormous copepod. Its sides and back are scarred and pitted with age and it is missing an eye and a hand, but it has strewn across its tapered, bulldog neck a _necklace_ made from what looks like fishing line and teeth, some of which – I blink, half-convinced I’ve gone insane and am hallucinating – look terribly human.

The copepod is curled over onto its side, and I can see beneath its bulk that it is resting on several animal pelts. Its one remaining hand strokes the fur idly as it watches us, and then it shifts a little, rolls over onto its belly. It raises its head and makes a buzzing, chittering noise that works its way into my bones and sets my teeth on edge, and a few vents on the other side of the organelle widen as two other copepods squeeze their way in. They start to approach us, mouthparts working, but the giant copepod gestures and they fall back towards the walls and simply sit still and watch us.

Behind the giant copepod – oh, of course.

Behind the Big Guy is a pile of what I initially think is trash, but as our lights play over I realize it must be more like treasure. I see more pelts, bits of clothes, disposable cameras, packs of cigarettes, jewelry, fishing rods, a set of tent stakes. I see shoes and shirts and flashlights, little bits and bobs, shiny things, precious things, all arranged in a massive pile there on the throbbing floor of the chamber. I can see a human skull, picked quite clean of flesh and yellowed a little, peeking out at me quite clearly.

And behind it, partially concealed by all the junk and detritus and cast-off relics that the copepods must have spent _years_ collecting, is an enormous gnarled crystal, spiked as a sea-urchin, glowing with a pale green fire somewhere in its depths. I think for a moment, as I stare deeply into it, that I can see something moving inside of it, but it’s just my imagination. The winking red light of the radio tracker patch someone from the ill-fated science team had slapped onto it flickers wanly at us.

The Big Guy spreads its arms. Its mouthparts scuttle over each other for a moment before a hideous, strangled noise emerges from them, but as its croaks and grunts and screeches continue on some part of my brain manages to piece together a pattern out of them, and then I freeze. I can feel my pulse throbbing in my ears and I recognize distantly that my mouth has fallen open.

 _“What… you want?”_ the copepod moans at us, and as the Sergeant takes a step forward, his hands empty and outward in an almost supplicating gesture, and begins to _speak_ to it, I feel my insides give an uncomfortable, shocked lurch, like the floor has just opened up beneath us and swallowed us whole, like the pit I’ve fallen into has come alive around me.


	10. Chapter 10

_“You come…here again?”_

“I know we said we wouldn’t,” the Sergeant says slowly, putting great care into his enunciation, “but it’s important.”

_“Im…por…tant?”_

“Yes. We have –“

 _“This…many more,”_ the copepod says, waggling three massive fingers at him. The Sergeant is silent for a moment.

“I don’t understand,” he says finally.

 _“You kill…this many…more,”_ the copepod grunts. I can hear it breathing, vast wheezing noises like the space in between notes on a bagpipe. _“This many more…past you said…you would leave.”_

The Sergeant sighs. “They attacked us outside of the barrows. The ones they attacked had no choice but to defend themselves.”

_“This…the…end, four-arms?”_

I frown, glance over at Elena. “Four-arms?” I mutter. She leans in closer to me.

“Their word for us. They haven’t got any legs so they don’t really grasp the distinction between a leg and an arm.”

I nod, staring down at the screen on my camera. The copepod looks far too glossy but with the gloves on the suit I don’t really have the dexterity to fiddle with it and I don’t want to take them off presently, so it’ll just have to be glossy. I look over at the two copepods that had come in earlier, still lurking behind the Big Guy like statues, clinging to the wall in positions that look as though they could push off and dart at us with absolutely minimal effort.

The rest of the team seems very relaxed, though; nobody, not even Crookshank, has their rifles up to cover the copepods. “Do you all come down here often?” I ask.

Elena shakes her head. “I’ve only been down here once before, and that was about a year ago.” Her eyes flick over to Peter. “Investigating a missing person.”

I think of several possible responses to that but bite them all back. None of them would be helpful, and at any rate my impulse to defend Peter has withered a little over the last few days. Probably just the hormones talking. Maybe if I didn’t get such a big damn case of the warm fuzzies whenever I so much as look at Elena –

“The end of what?” the Sergeant asks. The copepod gestures, a vague, open-handed, sweeping motion. It’s a terrifically human gesture and for a moment I stare, wondering, then its segmented mouthparts judder to life again and that horrible, inhuman voice issues forth from them again and some poor pattern-recognizing part of my brain gets whiplash from the disjointedness of it.

_“How we…end. Many…spawnings since we…meet, four-arms, and now…there is not…enough…to eat. If we…leave…to hunt, you…kill us.”_

The Sergeant starts to say something, but the copepod slams a fist into the ground. Next to me I feel Elena flinch, and on the far wall of the chamber one of the other copepods cocks its head.

 _“We are hungry,”_ it tells the Sergeant, and something about the way it says those three simple words strikes me like a lightning bolt, passing all the way through my stomach and out my tailbone. My hands are shaking lightly and part of me wants to panic, wants to be _out of here_ right _now_ , but I close my eyes and swallow hard and force myself to be calm.

The Sergeant, to his credit, doesn’t even blink. “We’re here to talk about that.”

The copepod is silent. It reaches up with its hand and rubs at its face lightly, in a motion that reminds me of a fly cleaning its compound eyes. _“Don’t…believe you,”_ it wheezes eventually.

“We are. We’re planning to start bringing food down for – for your people. But we need something in return.”

I glance over at the crystal again. It’s a good thing we brought Joker; I don’t know how we would have gotten it out of here if he weren’t here to carry it.

The copepod rolls its head back and makes a strange, scratchy, rhythmic noise, that I recognize after a moment as _laughter_.

_“You make…us starve, then…come with…solution…to problem…you made? And…you want…trade…for it?”_

I hear the Sergeant sigh, watch him look up at the ceiling. I’m impressed at how well he’s doing so far, especially considering (unless I have egregiously misread him) that he’s a soldier, not a diplomat. But now the copepod has handed him a real zinger.

“We never meant to hurt you,” he says. The copepod shifts lightly, the spongy floor creaking under its ponderous bulk. “There has been a long and bloody history between us and I wish it weren’t that way. I wish that things had been different, so many years ago when the first one of us had met the first one of you. I wish we had known to leave you alone and not interfere with your way of life. But the past can’t be changed, all we can do is try to right what wrongs we can.”

_“What…you want?”_

The Sergeant points to the crystal. “That,” he says. The copepod looks over at it and then reaches out and drags it, one handed, using what seems to be practically no effort, out from behind the pile.

_“Not…for trade.”_

“Not even for regular supplies of food?”

_“Not…for anything.”_

“Nothing at all?”

The copepod stops and looks at us. Its eyes seem to fix on something.

 _“Give me…that,”_ it says, pointing, and we all turn and stare at Crookshank, who the Sergeant had given his rifle to and who is now carrying both of them, somewhat awkwardly, beneath his armpits. He looks perturbed for a moment before he realizes and unlimbers one of them and sets the stock of it into the floor. I can see the muscles in the great knotty bulge of the Sergeant’s jaw working before he turns back around.

“Absolutely not,” he says.

_“Too…bad.”_

The Sergeant very clearly doesn’t know what to say, and then after a moment throws in the towel. “Alright,” he says. “Give me a minute, I have to ask.”

Then he turns around and takes a couple of respectful steps away before reaching down to his radio and calling Makado.

“They want _what_?” she groans, after he’s told her the news. The rest of us, listening in over the squad link, cast glances at each other but remain silent.

“One of the slug rifles,” he repeats. “I told him that we’d bring them regular shipments of food instead but he didn’t go for it.”

I hear Makado curse under her breath.

“You told them we’d _bring them_ food? Goddam it,” she mutters. “You didn’t have any authority to –“

“Veret,” the Sergeant snaps, his voice barely edging on civil. “We don’t have _time_ for this –“

“You expect me,” she hisses, her voice mingling with the static, “to give you the go-ahead to give them a fucking slug rifle? Why don’t we also turn off the sonic traps and leave the seal unlocked on the way out?”

“What do you want me to do, then?”

The copepod is watching this one-sided conversation with interest. The Sergeant’s voice is low and sharp but I’m sure the copepod can still hear some of what he’s saying. Its vocabulary seems fairly good but as for how much it understands…

“You said there’s only three of them in there right now, right?” Makado asks. I see the Sergeant shake his head.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “No way.”

“Sergeant,” Makado starts. I can hear a note of steel buried somewhere deep in her voice. “We need that crystal.”

“I’m going to give him the damn gun,” he tells her. Somewhere miles above us Makado slams her hand on her desk.

“Do _not_ –“

“I am _not_ ,” the Sergeant says, very quietly, “letting any more of my people die down here today. There are three copepods in here, and fifty within two hundred yards, and a hundred within a mile, and they _all_ are going to come running the instant we fire one of these guns.”

Makado is silent for a moment. “Fine,” she says. Her voice is hard enough to cut glass. “One rifle, no mags.”

“Fine.”

The channel cuts out with a resounding click. Elena and I trade glances; I can tell from her face that she’s never heard Makado that angry before.

The Sergeant reaches out for Crookshank’s rifle wordlessly and Crookshank hurries forward and hands it to him. The copepods on the walls draw in a little closer. I can see them practically twitching with anticipation, waiting for one of us to make the wrong move. The Sergeant turns, the slug rifle held in one hand, the barrel toward the ceiling. The copepod reaches out for it and the Sergeant places it gently in the thing’s hand.

Next to me I feel Elena shift her grip on her own rifle. The copepod looks down at the rifle in its hand for a long while.

“You should have taken the food,” the Sergeant tells it. The copepod in turn makes a snorting, chuffing noise. Then it closes its fist over the gun and with a sound like a groan of relief it bends and breaks. The bolt pops out and whizzes off somewhere in the darkness and the slugs pour from the ruined breach of the rifle like marbles, five of them clunking dully to the fleshy floor and rolling someplace out of sight. It tosses the bent frame of the rifle aside, and it clatters into the pile of junk and detritus and causes a small avalanche. The Sergeant steps back, eyes wary.

Then the copepod reaches over and shoves the crystal towards him. Its sharp spikes stick in the floor a little and leave bloody gouges in their wake. Whatever is inside it casting that green glow shifts lightly, with a kind of exaggerated slowness to it like it were floating in oil, and I glance down at the camera, make sure it’s in focus.

 _“Take…it,”_ the Big Guy tells us, and I can see by the look on the Sergeant’s face that he has a lot of questions he wants to ask, but instead of asking them he turns and gestures to Euler and after a little bit of prodding Euler manages to walk Joker forwards and find a decent place to grasp the crystal firmly, and then it picks it up.

One of the robot’s joints groans under the strain and Euler quickly prods at the joystick and it freezes, but after a few moments for he shrugs and continues twiddling, and Joker hefts the crystal like it were nothing and marches, a little unsteadily, back to us.

The copepod, meanwhile, has turned, rolling its enormous bulk delicately past us, and, with the assistance of one of the other copepods, which puts its arms on the Big Guy’s sides and is helping push, slithers out of the room. The audience, apparently, is over.

We all look around at each other but nobody feels any need to speak. There’s nothing to say. Crookshank is looking wistfully at the rifle on the ground, the barrel twisted like a piece of straw, but as we all begin to file out of the organelle and back into the snaking outer vent that got us there, Elena squeezes my hand firmly and I believe for a moment, just a moment, that everything might work out alright.

* * *

Elena twists around sharply and stares back into the darkness, her rifle low and ready. I peer backwards anxiously, then glance at her.

“What is it?”

She shakes her head, holds a hand up to me. “Shh,” she tells me.

Behind us the rest of the group marches onwards. There’s a distinct sense of relief in the air. Many of them, I realized belatedly, had expected that we were going to our deaths, that we were going to have to try to take the crystal by force. Ellis thought so for sure; his smile is unbearably bright and the Sergeant has had to tell him to shut up multiple times on the journey out, but his enthusiasm is so overflowing that he can’t shut up, he just keeps babbling on about whatever is in his head, what he’s going to do when he gets back to the surface, how nice it’ll be to have fresh air, so on and so on.

Elena is standing there quite still, her head cocked to one side. I listen but I can’t hear anything, and I start to tug at her sleeve, thinking that –

Wait.

I thought for a moment that I might have heard something, something very far away, but it was the sort of quiet, subtle noise that is hard to notice even in dead silence, and our current environment is very far from that. Everything down here seems to make noise; it’s a little like being in a forest in the middle of a windstorm. Instead of trees creaking and groaning and leaves scattering and wind rushing, you have the tramp tramp tramp of metal-plated feet, and the corresponding squelches of cleat sticking into the floor and the equally horrible meaty slurping sound with each step as they come unstuck. Then on top of that there’s groans and moans and straining noises. If you put your ear to someone’s stomach after they’ve just eaten you might get a sense of what it’s like, except fifty times louder and without anything in the way. The hallways shift around you, little wriggles of convulsive muscle movement going through them, and the noise is concurrent with the size and force of the muscles doing the moving. But there is a difference between the shrieking of a taut muscle and the shrieking of something in pain, far off in the distance, perhaps…

Elena leans in very sharply and reaches out with a balled fist and smacks the quick-release on the side of my helmet. The visor jets up and instantly the fetid smell of the Pit assaults me. My eyes start to water. “What the fuck,” I start to blurt, but Elena puts a gloved hand over my mouth. Her eyes are very clear and very bright; she’s already popped her own helmet so she can talk to me clearly.

“Listen to me, Roan,” she says, her eyes glancing over to the side and back the way we came before flicking over to me again. “If something happens down here, you stick to me like glue. Got it?”

I start to say something but she gives me a dangerous look and I swallow hard. “Got it,” I say.

“Okay, good,” she says. She flashes me a quick grin but I can tell she’s just giving me lip service, just from the way her eyes jump like roulette balls, scanning the surroundings even as she reaches over and flips my visor back into place. I had started to ask – well, I don’t know what I was going to ask. Probably something useless, some infantile plea for assurance that we were going to be okay. Clearly we aren’t if Elena is spooked like this. I look ahead of her at the rest of the team; they’re wary but not as wary as she is.

“Elena, what’s wrong?” I ask her, taking a hold of her arm, and she looks over at me and starts to answer, and then everything goes to hell.

Behind us I hear the sound I thought I had heard before, except much louder and clearer – a chittering shriek of either pain or rage, or perhaps some of both. Something about the tone makes me think it’s a copepod. The scream is cut off halfway through, and then we hear other screams, loud gurgling ululations, echoing through the vents. Everyone is yelling, everyone’s rifles are coming up very quickly, heads are whipping around and scattering the broad angry cones of headlamp light across the wet, glistening walls. The shrieks and cries are reaching a crescendo and it seems impossible that we can’t see any copepods at the present moment.

The side of the vent bulges inward suddenly and I see a long tapered mass slide by on the other side, and I realize that it must have been a copepod, sliding past as quickly as its resin-coated carapace will allow.

Elena has her hand under my arm and is tugging me along as quickly as we can go. I am deathly afraid I’m going to trip and fall and splatter face-first into the wet, bloody floor; I’m not digging in the cleats all the way, there isn’t _time_ to with the way she’s rushing me. I can see a flickering glance of Euler’s face, bringing up the rear behind us, feverishly punching buttons on the controller and working the joystick. He looks frightened and I feel suddenly and incongruously _bad_ for Euler, because he clearly has hated this place from the second he came down here, and it’s only his job that’s making him do it, and now he, and probably all of us, are going to die because of it.

I remember Makado very seriously considering us just opening up on the Big Guy, on the king of the copepods or whatever the hell the hierarchy is down here, just because he wanted a gun instead of just _giving_ us the crystal. The wan green light is still pressing tightly against my back from where Joker has the thing clenched tight in his metal hands, and I feel my lip curling and realize that maybe Elena is right, maybe Makado is out of line, maybe she’s let her – her obsession with making sure that the Pit doesn’t hurt anything and anyone else lead her to some bad decisions. Or maybe –

There’s a shriek behind us, sounding terribly close now. Elena and I look back, as does Euler, but we still can’t see anything.

I have never felt so helpless in my life. If a copepod comes out of nowhere and snatches me right now, that would be it, I’d be done for. I don’t want to even pretend that Elena would turn everyone around and get them to come charging back into certain doom to save my skinny ass. I can imagine the conversation now: “Oh yeah, El, sure we know you were getting your pussy eaten by that frail little skeleton girl from admin but no way in hell we’re risking our neck for her, capisce?”

All it would take, I figure, is for one of them to dart up from behind, where our visibility is the worst, grab my leg, and then reverse and zoom out of sight. They can move so quickly down here it doesn’t seem real. It’s like the way seals move, fluttering around on the ice on their bellies, tucked down and torpedo-shaped, their arms slicked back against their sides unless they’re reaching forward to dig in with their blunt, ichor-caked fingertips, adding momentum, whipping around hairpin turns.

A crazy thought strikes me as I stumble again and Elena wrenches me back to my feet – being a copepod must be like living in a funhouse where everything is a slide. I almost start to laugh but I shove it back down, deep down.

It happens very quickly. There is a loud chittering screech from ahead of us and we both whip around. There in front, clinging to the ceiling of the vent, is a slender copepod, slithering towards us hand over hand. When someone’s headlamp – I think it’s Fumi – strikes it in the face it shrieks and falls on him and one of the guns roars and even though my earplugs are in it is louder than loud, the flash from the muzzle is like the sun, and I think I shriek in terror and surprise and then I really do fall, but Elena, angel that she is, is there to pull me back to my feet.

While I’ve been face-down on the floor someone has shot the copepod a little off-center, and a hole as big around as my fist is half-heartedly gushing a chunky, glutinous white ichor. The copepod’s arms and fins are fluttering and we all give it a wide berth, hustling towards the exit.

It is such a long way off, though, and that copepod was only the first of many. Once we shot the first one there was no going back, and the air quickly turned smoky and foul with the stench of gunfire. It’s impossible to hear anything besides rage-filled animal screeches and the great pounding _thud_ every time someone fires off one of the guns. The pounding and the sharp crackling report melds together in my head and it sounds as though there is an idiot child pounding on a giant drum, having a temper tantrum, right next to me.

Elena tugs me onward. A copepod breaks into the center of our formation and brings its titan fist down in an arc, and though it is pinioned by rifle fire and dies twitching its fist still hurtles downwards and impacts square on Ellis’ head. He falls like a tree and there is cursing over the radio link and someone very close is screaming Ellis’ name and it takes me a moment to realize that it’s me, that I’m the one heaving out his name like it were vomit and staring back at his body, splayed spread-eagle on the ground, his visor shattered, part of his spine jutting through the thick fabric at the back of the neck of the suit. The copepod had hit him so hard that some part of him broke, and his head was forced downward, crushing his neck.

After that I consciously observe very little. It’s like my mind retreats into some dark corner of the inside of my skull and sits there in a huddle weeping while whatever animal, lizard part of me takes the reins is utterly unfazed by everything. I remember little flashes here and there, lit by gunfire; I remember copepods like enamel-white cruise missiles, darting in from barely-seen slits in the walls, their hands reaching for me, Elena slashing at them desperately with her knife; I remember Fumi’s bearded face, drawn and ashen, down on one knee slamming another magazine into his rifle and the sound it made when he pulled the bolt back was like glass shattering; I remember vast white arms and fingers wrapping around Crookshank’s thick waist and jerking him off of his feet and whisking him away into the darkness while everyone twisted and shot haphazardly, trying not to hit him. His face I remember particularly, for it was wide and frightened and for a moment I thought I could see the little boy he’d once been, peering out at me from inside the man’s body and wordlessly begging me to save him, but of course I couldn’t.

Our numbers dwindle one by one, first Ellis then Crookshank. I don’t see Klaus get taken; he just disappears in the frantic haze of gunsmoke and flashlight blur, and everyone is calling out for him. I remember the Sergeant barking, his voice like sandpaper, that Klaus is gone, his vitals aren’t registering, just _go_ , and us all _going_.

I remember seeing Joker, seeing snippets of Joker, rather, caught strobelike in the lights, battering aside a copepod, flashing a gunmetal-grey arm out to block one from reaching for Euler, the crystal set aside on the ground for a moment to give the machine a greater range of motion. I see its fingers fix around the wrist of the copepod and then _twist_ and with a piercing cry of rage the thing draws its hand back, clutching at the bloody, spurting stump where its hand had been, the shock of it giving Joker the moment of hesitation it needed in order to bound towards the copepod and slam its metal fist through the tough but brittle exoskeleton and submerge up to its elbow in the copepod’s guts. It pulls out a handful of slime and then closes its mechanical fist and pounds the copepod in the head and silences its screeching. Then –

“Roan, we have to _go_!” Elena screams from next to me, but I don’t hear her, I’ve stopped, or almost stopped, turned half around, walking precariously backwards.

There is something looming in the darkness behind Joker, something decidedly not a copepod. Joker’s head whips around, some sort of sensor or scanner detecting the movement, and the floodlights built into the machine’s face illuminate the writhing, terrible bulk of the Leechman, standing there in a slump on two wormy, leech-filled feet, shiny and slick and horrible. I let out a wordless cry and Elena looks back at me and sees it too and stops, I can hear her words die in her throat.

The Leechman is enormous, its height and bulk so immense that it seems to fill the entire breadth of the vent with a solid wall of squirming leeches. Joker cocks its arm back as Euler goggles up at the monstrosity lurking, head cocked at an inquisitive angle, staring down at the metal toy in front of it.

Then before Joker can throw the punch the Leechman reaches down and _envelops_ the machine in one massive appendage. I can see metal cracking, rivulets of rust and slime trickling down Joker’s armored legs. It manages to grab one of the leeches and crush it in its fist but then the Leechman tightens its grasp and one of Joker’s arms pops off, sparking all the way down until it thuds on the corridor floor. Elena is tugging at me but I can’t move, I can’t _think,_ I can only watch, mute, praying the camera is getting all of this, as it scoops up Euler as well in the other arm. He tries to run but doesn’t get anywhere, the arm stretching out after him and nabbing him, tendrils of leeches knotted or grown together slipping over him. I can see them biting into him, forcing themselves into him, and when he opens his mouth to scream they pour inside and he chokes and sputters and then they close over him and he is gone.

The Leechman tosses Joker to the side and he clatters to the ground like a mannequin, the roll-bars on his ribcage bent and shattered, his head dented and compressed. He rolls once then lies still.

Then, with barely a glance in our direction – if it even has eyes, if it even has anything to _sense_ with as I understand the word – the Leechman reaches down and picks up the crystal, and stomps off down the vent. It is such a banal, _normal_ motion that I almost burst out laughing, but I get the feeling that if I let myself laugh I will keep laughing and laughing until everything falls out of me and I’m left empty and echoing.

Ahead of us someone shoots again and a copepod screeches. I turn to see it, darting in, fins streamlined and tucked against its body, spewing ichor from one double-fisted hole in its carapace, a grazing wound, apparently, as it tugs Peter off his feet and down beneath it. I scream his name and start to rush forward but Elena blocks me, then steadies her rifle, but before she can fire the copepod pushes off and bears him struggling into the darkness.

“Goddam it!” I shriek and start after him, but Elena tugs me back and pushes me forward so hard that I go sprawling onto my knees. I cast her a furious glance and scramble to my feet but before I can say something cutting and hurtful that I’ll probably regret, even if Peter’s just been fucking snapped up by a copepod, the Sergeant calls from ahead of us to hurry the fuck up, it’s time to _leave_ , ladies, and I look ahead and see something that makes my jaw drop and my heart do flips in my chest – there ahead of us is the vast metal retaining wall that blocks off the barrows from the rest of the Pit, and there in the center of it is the great reinforced door, standing open and letting a flood of light pour in.

I look at Elena and take her offered hand and she has tears in her eyes but she isn’t faltering, not even for a moment, and in that instant whatever anger I could have felt at her is gone, utterly gone.

Behind us a copepod shrieks and then Fumi – _oh, thank god, at least Fumi made it –_ fires at it, and the slug passes so close to me that I can feel the wind even through the suit, and then we, Elena and I, her arm around me urging me forward and keeping me upright, make it to the door in what feels like an instant, and once we’re through the Sergeant slams it closed and spins the wheel to lock it.

And then, having nothing else sensible to do, I fall to the ground and start to cry.

* * *

I’ve got my helmet off and my sleeves rolled up. My gloves are lying on my stomach. Elena is running her hand softly through my hair and my eyes are a little puffy and sore but I’ve stopped crying. My nose, also, is becoming a little less stuffed, but that means I can smell the Pit again, so it’s a mixed blessing.

Elena’s been crying too but somehow I think she’s pulled it off more gracefully than I have. Instead of bawling and letting it all out in one go she’s managed to keep it down to a mute trickle. Every now and then she wipes at her eyes again and I squeeze her hand tighter for a moment and she squeezes mine back.

Ten minutes ago she’d leant in and held me very tight, even at the awkward angle she could manage, there on the ground, and I could feel in her a shuddering relief, an ease of tension. The copepods had stopped banging on the door ten minutes before that, and we had heard soft slithering sounds as they had retreated, and then we were alone in the silence.

I don’t feel like I’m alive. I don’t feel like I really made it out of there, I feel like a ghost, like I’m looking down from a great height at this slim, dark-haired girl in an ugly orange suit laying on the fleshy floor, looking beat-up and tired and done with this shit but not in a determined way, more like a resigned, given-up, “ _okay just keep rolling over me fucking_ whatever” kind of way.

The Sergeant is quietly arguing with Makado about ten feet away. I’ve turned off my radio so I can’t hear her, just him, one-sided and quietly serious, his face like an Easter Island statue. Moa? Moai? Maui? I should look up the word. I should _know_ something like that.

“Klaus, Crookshank. Ellis is dead for sure, we saw it. Euler. Fumi is okay, Roan’s okay, Elena is okay.”

A pause, then he closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

I can hear a tinny scream from all the way over here, of terrible rage that turns to grief partway through, and I know from the sound of it that she’s asked about Peter. I look at Elena and she looks at me.

“Are you okay?” she mouths at me, which is a question so incredibly dumb given the situation that my immediate instinct is to roll my eyes at her. Then it strikes me how incredibly understated just rolling my eyes would be and I nearly start crying again, and she sees it on my face and immediately her whole face shifts and she leans in to me the sheer amount of _care_ there does a strange thing to me and I bite my lip hard and reach out for her and put my hand to her cheek, and she kisses my palm despite how sweaty and gross it must be and I allow myself the indulgence of one brief moment to feel utterly, stupendously, selfishly relieved that her and I both are okay.

I again want to tell her something I know I shouldn’t but I stop myself. “No,” the Sergeant is saying, meanwhile. “No, we didn’t get the crystal.”

I hear another, quieter outburst from the other end, and the Sergeant holds the radio a little further away from his ear. “Joker’s fucked,” he says patiently. “As is Euler.”

“The Leechman got the crystal,” I call. My voice is scratchy. I cough, clear my throat and then repeat myself. “I saw it,” I add.

“Me too,” Elena nods, glancing at me. “Roan’s right, it was the Leechman.”

The Sergeant glances at us for a moment, probably wondering if our judgment can be trusted at the present moment, then nods and repeats what we’ve just told him to Makado. I hear a tiny sound of something shattering as if thrown and then the radio clicks off with a screech. The Sergeant sticks it back into his belt holster with a sigh and looks over at us. Fumi hasn’t said a word since we made it through the barrier; he’s slumped against the wall with his head in his hands. He looks up and when I can see his face it’s as though he’s a different person – that aura of impenetrable cool he’d maintained so elegantly up until now is utterly shattered.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” the Sergeant tells us, and after a moment Elena nods and gets to her feet and helps me up and then we get the fuck out of there.

We make our way through Oyster’s Shame and up the Cord. It is, insanely, four in the afternoon, which seems so banal and impossible to me that I nearly start laughing when Elena tells me the time. It feels like it’s about 13 in the evening or so.

We take frequent breaks, rest our legs and our hearts. There is less of a sense of urgency now, and the Sergeant doesn’t care as much what we do as long as we all stay together. Even so we don’t talk much. There’s nothing to say, or maybe there’s too much.

When we get to the top of the Cord the Sergeant looks back at us, pausing before he opens the door. It looks like he’s going to say something, but he stops, shakes his head minutely, and throws it open. The light from the harsh fluorescents pours down on him and for a moment all I can see is a silhouette.

Then a gunshot rings out from the vent behind him and the Sergeant takes one step forward, totters and falls. He lands hard on the metal grating of the floor and doesn’t move. A red pinprick brightens in the middle of his back, just on the other side of where his heart would have been.

I hear rattling from the staircase below as Fumi somehow manages to spur himself into action and sprint down it, taking the stairs two at a time. Before Elena or I can force ourselves to move, a figure steps into view. It holds a very big revolver and it’s aimed straight at me. Elena and I glance at each other and then raise our hands shakily into the air, and the figure cocks its head lightly, and as my eyes adjust to the light I can see it grin. Then I can see more of its face and I feel my mouth drop open as I start to say its name.

“Surprise,” Erica Walken says, and it is like the floor has opened up beneath me.


	11. Chapter 11

“Erica,” I ask her, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“Shut up,” she tells me, glancing behind her. I hear movement and then Marcus comes into view. He has a slim pistol gripped in his hand and casts a wary glance around the interior of the Cord before his eyes fall on the Sergeant’s prone form, laying just ahead of us.

“Is he dead?” he asks.

Erica prods at him with her foot gently. The Sergeant doesn’t move. I glance over at Elena; she is staring at his dead body with an unmistakable look of horror. I’ve never seen her look scared before.

Erica’s gun is still trained loosely on us but without it pointing directly at me I begin to relax a little. My heart is still pounding and there is a heavy, queasy sensation whenever I look at the Sergeant’s body, but I shut it out, don’t even begin to process it. I can see the golden gleam of the other bullets in the revolver’s cylinder, pointed at me, blunt and shark-nosed. I can feel myself trembling lightly, adrenaline and exhaustion and grief all welling up inside of me.

“You aren’t going to get away with this,” Elena says, and Erica rolls her eyes.

“Can we have a little less from the peanut gallery?” she asks. “Hand over the crystal and nobody else is going to get hurt.”

There is a moment of frozen silence before Elena and I both blurt out our responses to this ludicrous request at the same time. “The _crystal_?” I ask. “You know about the crystal?”

“Nobody _else_?” Elena asks. I can feel her fists clench next to me and I have to resist the urge to reach over and hold her back. “Nobody _else_?” she repeats. “You didn’t have to fucking shoot him!”

“I’m not here to get in a goddam argument,” Erica growls, prodding the barrel of the revolver into Elena’s chest. I eye Marcus warily; our eyes meet for a moment and he looks away, glancing over at Erica, but his pistol remains trained on me.

I can see Elena thinking about it, as she looks down at the pistol. Erica has committed one of the cardinal sins of holding someone at gunpoint – you never actually touch them with the gun. Or touch them at all, really, if you can help it. Every point of contact between them and you is a conduit for information – they’ll be able to tell the way you’re moving, how distracted you are, might even be able to guess how willing you are to actually pull that trigger if you try something.

And it can be a point of attack. During my Karate years in Oklahoma we did a section on realistic encounters – what to do if someone pulls a knife on you, pulls a gun on you, and so on. If they’re holding it close to you and you are very, very quick, you can snap your hands down from where you’re holding them up and empty-palmed and jerk the gun away, maybe even get it into your hands. I don’t know what hand-to-hand training in the Coast Guard or in the park ranger service was like, but if even I know the technique Elena probably knows something similar.

And she will also know that it isn’t something you can ever realistically pull off. The person with the gun has to be distracted, or possibly just disabled, not to be able to react in time. There’s a reason Ali always told us in class, very seriously, that if someone was holding us up to mug us, to just give them what they wanted. “You are _not_ ,” he said, “going to be faster than someone’s index finger moving a couple of centimeters. You will _die_ , unless you are very lucky. If they want something, give it to them. If they’re going to kill you, though,” he said, waggling his finger at us, flashing that brilliant smile, “it’ll be better than nothing.” Then we practiced headlocks and sleeper chokes.

So even though I can see Elena’s hands flexing with an unconscious urge to rip and choke and _get us out_ of this situation, she doesn’t move a muscle. I see her glance over at me, just a flicker, like checking a pulse, making sure I’m still here, I’m not panicking.

“Hand it over,” Erica repeats, glancing between us. I am very curious to find out how she expects us to just give her a crystal that’s roughly the weight and shape of a refrigerator, but maybe she doesn’t know how big it is. How the hell does she even know about it to begin with?

Makado. Somehow I know it must have been through Makado, one way or another. If she was willing to tell me, she’d potentially be willing to tell someone else, someone even more of a security risk than I am.

I remember Peter telling me, what feels like ages ago now, that the cult was harmless. Just a bunch of broken people trying to get by.

“We don’t have it,” I tell Erica. “It was a mess down there, an ambush. If you want it, go get it.”

Erica’s eyes are very cold. I can practically see the gears working as she measures what I’ve said. Elena edges slightly closer to me and the feeling of her there at my side is a comfort, but I am just praying that Erica isn’t cold-blooded enough to just shoot the two of us right now that she knows we don’t have the crystal.

Erica finally tells Marcus to search us, and he does so, tossing all of our various tools and gear into a small pile on the floor. I hear the lens of my camera shatter when he drops it and I can’t help but wince. He doesn’t pat us down very proficiently besides searching our pockets and our bags, which makes me reassess my initial assumptions – maybe this isn’t something that had a lot of planning put into it? Or at least she definitely couldn’t have been expecting to run into us here.

I look Erica over, head to toe. She’s dressed in hiking gear, but loosely – long shirt, long pants, but fairly thin. Without a climate controlled suit the humidity would be the real danger. Marcus is dressed similarly; I can’t tell for sure but I think he must have changed clothes at some point after he got into the Pit, changed into something more suitable for a long stay. And there must have been – well, what would he have eaten? Just – carved out bits from the walls? No way. Even if you were a certified card-carrying badass on a mission you’d have brought your own food. And Marcus does not strike me as the disgruntled ex-Army-Ranger type. Even just the way his hands traced over me with extreme delicacy and hesitation when he’d searched me made me think that taking captives must be an entirely new experience for him, and not one he’s comfortable with.

No, Erica is improvising. Which makes her more dangerous, especially if she gets desperate.

So let’s not make her get desperate.

“We’ll take you back down to get it,” I suggest. Erica looks over from her huddle with Marcus. Well, half a huddle, both still turned towards us, watching cautiously, guns still aimed at us but fingers off the triggers now. Elena nudges me and looks at me like I’m crazy but I shoot her a look that I hope says ‘trust me.’

“I thought you said it was an ambush?” Erica asks. “Down in the barrows?”

“Well, yes, but –“

“What, do you want us to go down there just to get eaten by copepods?”

“Do you want the crystal or not?” I shrug. “Doesn’t bother me none.”

She looks at Marcus. His face is tight and unreadable. “We’ll go down and check,” she says, nodding. “We’ve come all this way, it’d be stupid not to.”

“What about them?” he asks.

“Look,” Elena says urgently, “the Sergeant had a tracker PDA in his bag. It’ll show you exactly where the crystal is. Just take it and follow it and we’ll leave and pretend we never saw you.”

I resist the urge to bury my face in my hands. Elena’s got plenty of strengths but negotiation isn’t one of them.

Erica laughs at that suggestion and informs us that she has a better idea.

“Why don’t I,” she asks, rummaging through the pile of gear and coming up with a short length of rope, “tie you two up, and then you’ll lead us down to get the crystal? Or,” she says, brightening, “how about I get rid of one of you first –“

Elena stiffens next to me, but all I can feel is a cold hard knife-edged anger slicing at me. I look at Erica, really look at her, _force_ her to look at me, cram all of the casual hate I can into my gaze and throw it at her. “You’ll have to kill both of us, then,” I tell her. “Because if you kill her, I’m going to do the best I can to lead all of us straight into a copepod’s mouth. And if you kill me –“

Elena picks up where I left off, a little more bloody-minded: “and if you kill her,” she finishes, glancing over at me, “I’m going to do whatever I have to do to tear your throat out with my teeth before you put me down too.”

I have to stop myself from smiling when I hear her say that; I content myself with nudging a little closer to her as well so that our hips touch. That will have to be enough for now.

Erica has faltered a little. Even though she’s still got the gun, hell, she’s got two guns on her side, she isn’t certain. You can see it in her eyes. She draws back, then tries to save face. Predictable. “I was just – I wasn’t going to actually do it,” she says.

There is something very strange going on here. This is too disorganized to be a real attempt to – to what, _steal_ the crystal from us on the way back up? No way. Even if she’d brought the material and equipment needed to actually transport it without the use of Joker, she’d still have to contend with what should have been a full squad of combat-trained rangers, plus two useless hangers-on (me and Euler). She’d have had to have brought enough people to outgun us, and even then it’d be dicey in tight quarters like these, especially if the people she brought weren’t familiar with the Pit.

This – her and Marcus – _can’t_ be it. It simply can’t. Even if she thinks that the crystal could fit in her pocket she would still have to take it from us. This is something opportunistic, something important to her for some reason, important enough to throw her entire life away for a shot at, for a _crazy_ shot at, for a Hail Mary at the buzzer.

I turn and look down the Cord, at the sparking depths of it, at the rows and rows of spiral-staircase encasing it. I wonder where Fumi is, what Fumi’s doing, whether he’s okay. Maybe it was cowardly for him to run but I’m glad that he did, I’m glad that at least he got out of this okay. For the moment anyway.

She’s going to make us go back down. There’s no way around it. I can feel myself sagging at the thought of it, at the thought of going back down there and seeing with fresh eyes all the death that’s waiting down there. I had kept it together admirably well up until now but I can feel myself clenching, I can feel myself freezing up, shying away from even thinking about it like if I don’t it won’t be able to touch me. I want to close my eyes and cry, for Euler, for the Sergeant, for Ellis, for Slate and Crookshank and all the others that are down there even still, I want to just heave out sobs until I can’t any more and I’ll be empty. Being empty sounds good right now but I’m not and I can’t be.

I wonder for a brief moment whether this is what PTSD is, whether I’ve been _damaged_ somehow, and then my lip curls without any conscious effort and I can feel myself tighten, drag myself back upwards like chains ratcheting along my spine.

“Fuck it,” I say. Everyone looks round at me and I realize that I’ve said it a little louder than I meant to. Ordinarily I’d shrink and get embarrassed but I have gone through so much shit lately that I feel an uncharacteristic willingness to take up space, to be violent. I am tired.

I look at Erica again. “If this crystal is so fucking important we’ll go back down and you can look at it and admit that it was a stupid idea to go down there and then we can come back up. Alright? But don’t you ever point that fucking gun at her,” I say, pointing to Elena. “No, fucking look at me, I’m serious. I don’t give a _shit_. You don’t know this terrain, you don’t know this area, and even if you’ve been here before you don’t know the lay of the land right now. You need us, both of us, so give us a little fucking respect. We’ll fucking guide you down there but treat us like fucking human beings, you bitch.”

Erica’s eyes are very wide, and it is very, very quiet as my voice fades into the dull, thick air. Then her eyes go slatey and hard and she strikes me across the face. I see it coming and could have blocked it but I stopped myself, which is a little harder than it sounds, because the instinct when you can see a blow like that is to either dodge it or put your hands up, but she’s still got the gun.

I can feel the butt of the revolver smack into my cheekbone and there’s a starburst of pain there. I stagger back a little, bumping into Elena, and then she is holding me. I can hear her growling at Erica, calling her a bitch, but Marcus points his gun at her and she quiets a little. Then Erica hauls me to my feet. Her nails are digging into my shoulder painfully and I cry out softly. She digs the barrel of the gun into my gut and the feeling of it is like icewater. My hands are shaking and no matter how hard I try I can’t stop them.

I begin to realize that I may have made a mistake.

“No,” Erica snarls, “you listen to me, you little shit. You are in no position to make any fucking demands. You’re going to lead us down there and thank us profusely if we decide not to end your miserable lives once we’ve got the damn crystal. You understand?”

Her hand tightens further around my throat – when did she start choking me? – and I croak something out, but I am too busy panicking to realize whether or not I actually meant to form words or if I just let out a mindless squeak of fear.

One thing karate in a dojo will not teach you is how to handle imminent mortality. Nobody who learns karate expects to ever actually need to use it. Karate isn’t even a real way of fighting – it’s more of a sport, something for lazy dojo tigers to pad around showing off, sparring for points. The grabs and chokes and defenses I know are more MMA than anything else. What’ll karate, pure karate, do to help in a real fight? Are you going to throw a spin kick at somebody? Please.

I can’t breathe. I bat ineffectually at Erica’s face and her shoulders but she doesn’t even bother to stop me. Finally, after what seems like forever, she lets go and I fall to the ground in a huddle, coughing and gasping. Elena is there, curled over me protectively, glaring daggers at Erica, and even Marcus is eyeing her a little warily.

“You could have fucking killed her!” Elena spits, and a little of that uncertainty returns to Erica’s eyes, or at least I think it does – mine are still a little bleary. When I can blink the tears from them and look at her again she seems utterly unruffled.

“Tie their hands,” she says to Marcus, and after only a moment of hesitation he does so, and then we are making our slow, awkward, armless way down the Cord, back towards the barrows.

* * *

“We need a break,” Elena points out again, and again Erica does nothing but click her tongue and urge us onward, gesturing with the barrel of the revolver. Not only has Marcus bound our hands but he’s also tied us together, making it so that Elena and I are linked by only a couple feet of paracord. It’s been biting roughly into my wrists for the last couple of hours and if this keeps up I’m going to have ugly welts because of it. Erica and Marcus have both relaxed a little, especially since they’ve gotten rid of all of our gear. She got Elena to show her how to work the Sergeant’s tracker, and I almost cried when they had to flip him over in order to take it from his bag. The look of stunned surprise frozen on his face was so gentle and unlike him that it almost made him look like a different person entirely.

I don’t even know why I was crying – he was an asshole, for sure, but there was something, I don’t know, something _meaningful_ to him that made me think that there were reasons. And of course there are always reasons that people end up acting like that but sometimes people end up being so crabbed and gnarled and nasty that you don’t _want_ to find reasons to unpeel them from themselves and look at the kind of person they are really. The Sergeant I would have liked to have sat down and had a drink with and gotten to know, just for pure raw opportunistic curiosity.

I didn’t even have the luxury of closing his eyes for him, because as soon as Erica had retrieved the PDA and browbeat Elena into showing her how to work it – oh, how my blood boiled as she called Elena a bitch and a cunt and worst of all fucking _stupid_ just because she kept fumbling with the login screen and getting her account on the PDA to track the crystal as well – we were off and marching, leaving the Sergeant sprawled there, staring up dead and empty at the cold metal-capped ceiling.

I don’t have it in me to feel angry, I don’t have it in me to hate. That will come later. Right now I’m too tired. I am too damn sour at myself for reading Erica wrong. I thought I could cow her, I thought that even though she had the gun I figured she’d back down. At the very least we wouldn’t be tied up, even if we were marching all the way back down to the barrows on a pointless errand that might get us killed.

Once we’re down at our stop on the Cord and out and walking down the long, damp path down to the barrows, Elena turns around, fixes Erica with a glare. I can still see a cold light of hatred burning somewhere deep down inside of her cool grey eyes and for a moment I feel frightened for her, I feel momentarily terrified that she’s going to try something and get herself shot and I – I –

“What’s this crystal to you?” she asks Erica, and I swallow hard and glance back at Erica as well, waiting to see what she’ll say, if she’ll even give us a straight answer. I look at her and those dark eyes stare back at us. She is – I will give her this, she’s determined. She has set her mind to doing this, whatever the hell _this_ is, and she’s going to be willing to throw us all away if she has to. You can see it in the set of her jaw, in the way her eyes rake us like an eagle’s claws. “What’s the point of all this?” Elena continues. Erica’s nose wrinkles lightly. I wonder if she’ll even bother trying to win us over, whether she’ll figure that her having shot the Sergeant will have turned us against her permanently.

Erica nods to Marcus and he unties us and we all huddle there for a while against the side of the corridor, sit down in the sopping squelch of it, too tired to care. Erica leans against the ribbed wall of the vent and looks down along its depths towards the barrows. She’s still holding the revolver but at least it isn’t pointed at us.

Elena leans in to me and rests her head on my shoulder and I kiss the top of her head, and I feel her smile faintly, but it vanishes quickly. This isn’t going how I wanted at all. I want to say something to her, I want to kiss her and tell her it’s going to be okay. She’s so tough but she’s so scared, I can tell she’s scared, and I want to show her that I can be tough too. That I am more than an anchor. But doing that in front of Erica and Marcus would feel – dirty, somehow. Uncomfortable. I itch at the thought of it. So instead I sit there very still and let her rest her head on me and let that be enough.

“My husband was there four years ago,” Erica says, and we both look up at her. Marcus doesn’t look interested, clearly he knows this story, he’s heard it before. “At the disaster,” Erica clarifies.

She waits for a moment, maybe to see whether or not we’ve got any response. Elena and I stay quiet, no ‘oh really’ or ‘no way.’ If she wants us to be buddy-buddy with her she’s straight out of luck.

“You know what that crystal is, don’t you?” she asks, and Elena snorts. I would as well but the welt on my cheek from where she got me with the butt of the revolver hurts too much whenever I move my nose.

“I do,” Elena says. “Do you?”

Erica laughs. There isn’t much humor in it. “I don’t think you do. I think I know much better than you do.”

“Explain it to us, then,” Elena tells her, and I nod in agreement. The longer we can keep her talking, hopefully, the longer we’ll be able to rest.

“My husband Burt,” Erica says, “was a ranger here at the park. And he was here in 2007. But he wasn’t the ordinary type of ranger, he worked at the one place in this park that required a security clearance.”

Elena frowns. “I don’t know what –“

“You see,” Erica continues, “when they found the Pit back in the 70s, they found ritual grounds too. _Old_ places, places that the indigenous tribes had been using for centuries to commune with the Pit. This place,” Erica gestures widely, “is alive. It feels and reacts. It _thinks_.”

Elena snorts again, a little softer this time. “In the ritual grounds there were crystals exactly like the one you were sent down to find, only carved and shaped so that if someone who knew what they were doing hit them with a strike in just the right way, they’d resonate. And that resonance could influence the Pit. Make it calm down if it were starting to wake up, make it wake if it were sleeping. Calm the wildlife, make it possible to live down here without any danger. Or send them into a frenzy.”

“Sounds like magic,” I murmur, but without much conviction. Makado, in that hurried briefing after Slate had died, had said something a little similar. I look at Erica, meet her eyes. “Did your husband work on the – the contingency plan?”

That catches Erica up for a moment, but she nods, glancing over at me. Her eyes, I notice, linger for a moment on the swollen mark on my cheek. “Yes,” she says finally. “Yes, he did. And he was there when they broke the crystals. See, I figure someone, Veret probably, told you about the crystal and _why_ they want it. But nobody would have told you about what exactly the crystal did when it was broken.”

“Well, it – it put the Pit to sleep.”

“Yes,” Erica nods. “Yes, it did. But did they tell you what it did to the people there? Some of them, at least.”

Elena frowns. She starts to say something but I nod. “Peter told me,” I say. Elena is giving me a very confused look. “Not all of it,” I add, “but enough to piece together the parts. I hadn’t known it was breaking the crystal that had done it, but I could guess.”

“What - ?” Elena starts.

“It’s a – when they shattered the crystals it caused something like a contagious psychic plague,” I tell her, glancing at Erica. “From what Peter told me it sounded like it would gradually erode your self-control and make you want to come to the Pit, to come down into the Pit and, well, I don’t know what happened to them once they got in. I don’t think Peter did either. And if you weren’t able to get to the Pit you’d get to a point where you’d be spreading it to everybody you were near just – just mentally, I guess. I know it sounds like bullshit but it’s true, I swear it’s true.”

“But if that’s true why was Peter smuggling people in? It must have been people with that – with that disease,” Elena says. “Why didn’t he try to help them? I mean, Christ, people without any preparation, sick people, down here in the Pit, they wouldn’t last a fucking day. That’s –“

“Because the cure,” I tell her, “has a good chance of completely wiping out your personality,” I tell her, and she quiets. She believes me, I think, she has to believe me. Or if she doesn’t believe me she trusts me, at least. I don’t give myself time to feel warm and fuzzy about it. “That’s what Peter told me, anyway. He was one of the lucky ones.”

“He had this disease?” she asks, glancing over at me.

“Yes,” Erica says. “He did. Roan’s pretty much right about the details. Peter was lucky.”

“So he and Makado decided it would be better to just smuggle people in? Let them go down there to die?”

I can tell by the look on her face that Elena thinks this would be just as bad. I shrug. I can feel the exhaustion in the weight of my shoulders. “What would you do?” I ask. “At least they were still people when they died.”

“I can’t believe you’re supporting –“

“Peace,” Erica says quietly. “All that’s over now, now that Peter’s – well, is he dead?”

I think about it. “I didn’t see him die,” I tell her. “But he must have. I don’t know how anybody else could have lived down there. It was awful.”

“It was stupid,” she says, “going down to the barrows to try and get it.”

“Makado was desperate,” Elena says. “She was afraid that the Pit was going to wake up sometime soon and without another crystal to break to send it back to sleep, they wouldn’t be able to contain it.”

“Well,” Erica says, running a hand through her hair, “you can see the logic in it, can’t you? But I think she’s being played. And in turn she’s playing you, all the rangers in the team that went down. How many were there?”

“Eight,” I say. “Plus me and one other.”

Erica nods. “See, the problem with breaking the crystals is that, yeah, it’s an immediate solution. But did you ever think why they found those thousand-year-old crystals carved and perfect and _intact_? Not cracked to pieces?”

“Why?” Elena asks. She still has an ugly sullen undertone to her voice but she’s listening, she’s evaluating. I don’t think Erica is necessarily going to lie to us but I think whatever information she’s operating off of must be flawed if she’s come down here herself.

“Because,” Erica says, giving us a little mirthless smile, “cracking one of those crystals is like knocking the Pit out, rather than easing it into a natural sleep like you supposedly can do if you strike it the right way. It’ll wake up sooner and angrier and hungrier than it would otherwise. I don’t think they meant to crack it but I don’t think they’ve done their research, they haven’t even tried to reach out to some of the native communities around here that might still have had a little knowledge about how these things work. They fucked everything up in the 70s, made a lot of people very mad at them. I don’t think they know how bad they’ve made things. If they get their hands on that crystal and end up cracking it again, it’ll –“

“Alright,” Elena says. “I get the picture.”

“What happened to Burt?” I ask, and Erica sighs.

“Well,” she says, “they told me he was dead. Wasn’t true for a couple months after, though. They shipped him off to a lab somewhere, I have no idea where, and used him and a bunch of other people from the park who were suffering the worst to try and develop some kind of treatment. I only found out because he was able to sneak out and call me from a pay phone someplace outside wherever they were keeping him. He told me everything and ever since then –“

She can’t go on, her voice cuts off in a sudden choke.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and Elena looks at me sharply. I meet her gaze evenly, then turn back to Erica. “I’m sorry that that happened, because you nor him deserved it. But coming down here, _killing_ the Sergeant, with no plan, not even the –“

“If I don’t at least _try_ to do something to stop everything from happening all over again,” Erica tells me, “I’d never forgive myself.” She pauses for a moment, starts to say something, then thinks better of it. “Maybe I’m making a mistake but I’m going to do the right thing.”

There is a brief, brief silence that passes between us. Elena reaches over and hugs me, but while her lips are pressed close to my ear, she hisses to me that this isn’t our fucking fight and to follow her lead when she makes us get moving again, and as she says it I feel a looming terror break over me like a riptide and I look at her as she pulls away and want so terribly to tell her not to, whatever she’s thinking about doing to just _not_ , don’t do anything stupid, if I lost her I – I –

And then Erica is gesturing at us with the gun to get up, saying that it’s time to get a move on, and as Marcus comes over, his slim little automatic clutched loosely in his hand, aimed at us but from the hip, and offers Elena a hand, she takes it wordlessly and pulls herself up, her hand leaving mine with only a tight, brief squeeze. Then once she’s up she shoves Marcus off-balance and before he can even think to do anything other than reach out reflexively to catch himself she’s got both hands on the gun and is struggling with him for it. “Elena!” I croak, starting to rise, just as Erica screams at her to stop, legs spread wide in a shooter’s stance, trying to get a clear shot at her. Marcus’s gun is pointing straight at me and I scream and throw myself to the side just a moment before it goes off and a bullet shrieks past and buries itself in the fleshy wall of the corridor behind me, just where I had been standing. While I try to scramble to my feet amid the dirt and muck on the floor I hear another gunshot, and then a body falls next to me face-down and starts writhing, and when I see Marcus staggering to his feet and realize who has fallen heavily, a string of curses bubbling from her blood-flecked lips, I scream Elena’s name over and over again, pressing my hands over the streaming hole in her side with desperation born of utter futility.


	12. Chapter 12

Elena stumbles again and I spread my legs awkwardly, trying to compensate for the added weight on my left side. She clutches desperately at my shoulder and I put my other arm around her as well, get her stable. I can feel the crust of dried blood just below my hand, feel her pulse pounding and her chest heaving. She moans, low and terrified and I tell her again that it’s going to be okay.

We’re nearly to Oyster’s Shame. Elena had said through gritted teeth that there’d be a medical kit there that we could use to get her patched up. Erica and Marcus had been in favor of just leaving her but I had flat-out refused to go any further if they did that and even though Erica struck me again I stayed resolute, my lip trembling, trying to blink away tears, while Elena writhed there on the floor and broke my heart a dozen times with the tiny scared noises she was making. Eventually they’d relented and I had gone to Elena and helped her up as best I could.

I glance over my shoulder and meet Erica’s cold, defiant eyes. “Can one of you help me?” I growl. “If she falls –“

“Crazy bitch attacked me –“ Marcus grumbles, and I can feel myself go cold all over, the hair on my arms standing up inside the suit, then Elena clutches on to me harder and I can shove it behind me, I can deal with it later, right now I have to get Elena safe.

“You okay, El?” I ask her, and she nods briefly. Her face is pale and she’s favoring one leg. The bullet went straight through her, in and out midway down her abdomen, off to the left and just above her pelvis; she was lucky, I think. If it had gone lower it would have clipped her hipbone and either shattered or broken it or ricocheted off inside of her and made a mess of her intestines.

She seems – better than I would have expected for having just been shot. There are tears running down her face beneath the helmet and I long to pop it open and wipe them away for her but I know I probably shouldn’t. She probably needs to cleaner air that leaving it closed will provide, she probably – well, I don’t even know. I don’t know how serious this is, I don’t know if we can just patch her up and she’ll be fine or if she needs to get real medical attention, I don’t know. I’m so far out of my element I want to cry, but I know if I do it’ll just make Elena even more scared. Or maybe she doesn’t need me to –

“Roan?”

“Yeah, what is it?” I ask, snapping off that line of thought as quickly as it appeared. “You okay?”

“No,” she laughs weakly, “I’ve been shot.”

“We’re gonna get you to Oyster’s Shame,” I assure her, “you’re going to be okay.”

Elena shakes her head. “No,” she grunts, “I don’t think – ah.”

“You okay?” I ask again, glancing over at her. I catch the tail edge of a wince before she stuffs it back down again.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m – I’ll be fine.”

“We’re almost there,” I tell her, hoping that it’s true. I can barely remember the way down from this end of the Cord, but if I’m right it should be just around this fleshy, ribbed bend in the vent just here –

We round the corner and I stop. The fleshy corridor trails along into darkness ahead of us. I sigh.

“Where are we?” Elena asks, her voice tight.

“I – I don’t know,” I admit. “I thought this was the way to Oyster’s Shame, but…”

“Goddam it,” Elena mutters, and I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, glancing behind us at Erica and Marcus again. They haven’t seemed to notice anything amiss so I assume that they’re just as lost as we are and had just been following me, guessing I knew the way to go. “I, uh,” I stammer. Erica is frowning down at the little tracking PDA; that might have a map on it, but I know if I ask she’d never show it to me.

“I should have been paying attention,” Elena growls. I feel a sudden snap of fear as I realize that she might be mad at me.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her again. She tosses her head, or tries to, inside her helmet. She looks over at me and gives me a slow smile.

“Pop my helmet, huh?” she asks, and I frown.

“Are you sure? The air –“

“It won’t do me any less good without the glass in the way. Go on.”

So I reach over and I hit the release button just the way she showed me a few days ago and the visor snaps up and Elena takes a deep breath and looks a little relieved. “Christ,” she mutters. “It was getting stuffy in there.”

“Do you know where we are?” I ask her quietly. There’s a shuffle from behind us.

“What’s the hold up?” Erica calls, and I gesture.

“Just give us a second,” I tell her.

“Let’s hurry it up,” Erica says after a moment.

I shut my eyes, squeeze them hard for a moment. Elena makes another small, painful noise and I can feel panic lurking close near me. “Do you know where we are?” I ask her softly, and after a moment Elena nods.

“Yeah,” she grunts. “Keep going straight.”

“Okay,” I say. I start to apologize again but she squeezes at my shoulder so hard it hurts.

“Stop it,” she tells me. “You’re doing – ow – great. You’re doing so great, baby.”

Something about her calling me baby, especially given the circumstances, breaks through and I feel myself start crying in spite of my best efforts.

“Goddam it,” I mumble.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ll be okay, don’t worry about me.”

“I’m so scared, Elena, I’m so scared –“

“Shh, Roan, shh, hold me.”

She takes my arm and puts it around her and then tears her glove off with her teeth, lets it fall onto the wet ground. She puts her hand atop mine and our fingers knit together like they were meant to and I feel a tiny bit better. Then, just a few seconds later she stumbles and lets out a hiss of pain and I am dropped right back into a queasy hell of worry. Even as we forge forward around the next corner and the opalescent recesses of Oyster’s Shame open before us, there is a biting whine to the ragged edge of Elena’s breaths that makes me sick with worry.

We hobble our way to the ranger station and head in, and Elena directs me to the rearmost room, which is a combination dormitory and aid station; there’s a kit on the wall that I rip from its cradle, and then Erica, sighing heavily, tells us she’ll give us some privacy and to not bother trying anything as Marcus will be right outside. It’s a surprisingly compassionate gesture but it doesn’t change the ember of hate she’s put in my heart by shooting Elena, by striking me across the face. Even if she’s going through the motions, even if she’s doing what she thinks is right –

“Roan, help me,” Elena says, and then I come around behind her and help her out of the bulky ranger suit and then Elena is standing there in her underwear and I can’t stop staring at the bloody wound in her side and she must see something of it in my face because she reaches out with one hand and catches my cheek and cradles it gently. “You’re doing great,” she says, her voice only a little tight. “I’m really proud of you,” she tells me, and I glance up at her, catch her sea-green eyes like a flash of sun on the water. I swallow hard.

“Tell me what you need me to do.”

“Um,” she says, gingerly lowering herself onto one of the cots. “See that little bottle of disinfectant?”

“Oh Christ,” I say, “this is going to hurt really fucking bad,” and she nods.

“I know but we have to –“

“Do you want to hold my hand?” I ask as I open the bottle, and she thinks about it for a moment and then nods.

“Yeah,” she says, “that might help.”

And the next half an hour passes in a blur. I pour the disinfectant on the wound and clean it as best I can as Elena grits her teeth and tries her best to keep quiet even though I keep tell her to squeeze my hand if it hurts and to just be as loud as she needs to be, and then I flip her over and do the same with the slightly larger wound on her back. I again end up marveling at how lucky a shot it was – as best as I can tell it didn’t do much more than clip her lower intestine, I think, if that. My knowledge of anatomy is spotty at best, but it doesn’t seem like it hit her lung or her ribs, and I don’t think it hit a kidney – those are lower, aren’t they, inside the clamshelled armor of the hipbone? I think so, anyway.

While Elena lays there and breathes heavily I give her a shot of painkiller into, as advised on the casing of the hypodermic, the left buttock, and then I gauze the wounds at her direction, and then she is sitting up, a little bit more color in her cheeks. I am not quite as terrified for her as I was forty-five minutes ago. The main danger, I tell her, a crooked smile on my face as I acknowledge the absurdity of even pretending I’m any kind of expert, is probably going to be infection, and Elena nods and then pulls me downward and into the cot with her. I put a hand out to catch myself but she has me in her strong, freckled arms and then she is tucking me into the scant space alongside her and then she presses her face down along my neck, my shoulders, my collarbones, and then she kisses me and her lips are like fire.

“Thank you,” she says, her voice muffled from down near my breast, but before I can say anything or do anything more than smooth out her lank, sweat-damp hair, Erica knocks on the door.

“You guys done in there?”

“Goddam it,” I say to myself. Elena starts to get up, quiet fury in her eyes, but I hold her tighter, use my weight to keep her in the cot. “Please,” I call, trying to keep my voice civil, “Erica, please, can you give us – an hour? Just to rest. We’re dog tired.”

There’s a long silence and then Erica, her voice a little less harsh, tells us that we’ve got forty-five minutes, and then there’s the sound of her footsteps retreating, and I blow out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Then I look down at Elena and smile at her. “You okay?” I ask her, and she nods.

“Not great,” she admits, “but I’ll live. I need to get back up to medical, though, pronto.”

I bite my lip and then tell her. “I’ve been thinking –“

“Uh oh.”

“Shut up. I’ve been thinking, I’ll try and make a deal with Erica,” I say, letting my eyelids flutter half-closed, rolling my eyes upward to gauge her reaction. Her eyes are shut and her face is for the moment, peaceful. Then her eyes pop open as I continue. “I’ll try and get her to let you go, let you make your way up to get help, and I’ll stay down here with her as collateral.”

“Roan, _no_.”

I can’t meet her eyes, even though I know she’s staring at me hard enough to burn holes through me. “Elena –“

“Roan, I can’t let you do that.”

“How are you going to stop me?” I ask, feeling suddenly defiant. “You’re in no condition to stay down here, you’d –“

“I’d be fine.”

“You’ve been _shot_ ,” I remind her. “You need to get to a doctor. Some disinfectant and gauze isn’t going to do it long-term.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” she tells me, in a very small voice.

“How do you think I feel?”

“You should –“

“Elena –“

“No, Roan, listen to me. You don’t have any training, any experience. You’re a _journalist_. That woman out there is a fucking psycho and she’s going to get you killed going after that fucking crystal.”

“No,” I growl, suddenly furious, “you fucking listen to me. How do you think I feel seeing you _get shot_ because you decided you were going to try and jump two people with guns? How do you think that makes me feel? I have been scared shitless for the last hour because I was _so afraid_ you were going to _die_ without even giving me a chance to tell you that –“

I snap my mouth shut before it can run away on me even further. Elena frowns at me and I shake my head, try to pretend I wasn’t going to say anything. “If you died down here,” I say, very seriously, “it’d kill me. I wouldn’t – I wouldn’t be able to go on. I’d lose it. So you can’t, you can’t stay down here and sacrifice yourself for me. You’re going to have to go up and make it to a doctor. You just have to.”

“And what if you die down here?” she asks me. There are tears in her eyes and I can’t bear seeing them, so I bury my head in her neck instead. She holds me very tightly. “What am I supposed to do knowing that I left you here?”

“Shake your head at me and call me an idiot,” I suggest, and Elena laughs weakly.

There is a long slow silence then, and we lay there in the cot and hold each other for a long while. Elena is warm and she smells strongly of rubbing alcohol, but she runs her hands through my hair and then puts one hand on my ass and squeezes gently and I bite my lip hard, turning away so that she can’t see.

“So what were you going to say earlier?”

I give her a questioning grunt and she rolls her eyes. She seems to have found a comfortable position to lay in that isn’t causing too much pain and as a result she’s relaxed a little. Not too much – not enough to forget that she’s been shot. But for the moment she’s as happy as can be expected and I’m glad of it.

“You know,” she says. “You were going to tell me something then stopped yourself.”

Goddam it, Elena.

“Can’t you just forget about it?” I ask her, and Elena is quiet for a moment, and then she takes my head gently in her hands and brings it up so that our foreheads are touching and she is staring directly into my eyes. I can feel myself blushing but she just holds me there for a moment. She kisses me softly on the lips.

“Roan,” she says, “please don’t ever do that, please don’t ever think that I’m going to think that you’re stupid or embarrassing or – or I don’t know, whatever you thought, just for something you wanted to say. I don’t care what it is, I don’t care how dumb it is, but _please_ don’t do that because it makes me feel like shit –“

“I didn’t mean –“

“I know you didn’t mean it,” she mutters, folding me down against her shoulder. Her fingers knit softly into my hair and I reflect for a moment that I have never felt so – so loved as I have in this moment. “But I just absolutely hate it when –“

I squeeze my eyes shut. “I was going to say that I loved you,” I tell her, and I feel Elena freeze. My heart falls like it was shoved out of an airplane. Immediately I begin to justify. “I knew it was dumb, I knew I shouldn’t have said it,” I tell her, “so that’s why I stopped myself. Cause it hasn’t even been a week that I’ve known you and I know I’m just talking from hormones and fear and all of the _shit_ that we’ve gone through down here, and I know that we said we were going to just see how things went and I feel so stupid –“

“Roan,” she says quietly, “shut up.”

Goddam it. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “Oh, goddam it,” I blurt into her shoulder, starting to roll away, “I always do this, I always rush into everything and ruin it, goddam it –“

“Roan!” she barks, and I very nearly burst into tears but I manage to stop myself. At the very least I clamp my mouth shut. She catches my shoulder before I can turn my back to her and pulls me back in and though I resist at first I stop and let her hold me. I don’t want to be pitied but I don’t want her to let go. I take a shaky breath and let it out.

“Is that really how you feel?” Elena asks and I think about lying but I don’t. I nod, not trusting myself to speak. Elena kisses my forehead.

It is a long while before she speaks again. “I don’t know if I love you,” she tells me. “The image I have of myself in my head, it isn’t – I mean, I like, don’t think of myself as a lesbian. Or even as bi. That isn’t part of my concept of who I am. And I told you before, you know, I told you I’ve always been curious. That was what I was thinking when I met you, all those times in the gym, at that party. I wasn’t thinking with anything other than my vagina, I just like – I could tell that you wanted to get with me and I was okay with that, if for nothing other than the novelty of it.”

She holds me tighter and kisses me again. There is a very small catch in her voice when she continues. “But these past couple of days I – you’re one of the most interesting people I’ve met in a long time, and your personality and mine, I think we click really well. I like being around you, it isn’t just about the sex or your body or because I think you’re hot, it isn’t just physical, I mean. I don’t –“

I look at Elena finally and I realize with a jolt that she’s a little scared, she’s a little unsure of herself. I smile at her, first hesitantly then with growing confidence, and as the corner of her lip quirks upward into an unwilling smile I start to relax. “I don’t know if I love you but I think I could,” she says. “If we had time, you know, longer than a couple of days.”

“It sounds like,” I say, “you’re asking if I want to be your girlfriend?”

Elena blushes. “Maybe,” she admits.

“Oh no,” I laugh. “You’re going to have to be way more definite than that.”

“Okay,” she grins, “then yes, yes I am.”

“You are what?”

Her mouth drops open slightly in mock affront at my cheekiness. “You are just eating this up, aren’t you?”

“Might be.”

She rolls her eyes and then her hand is back on my ass and squeezing it again and my hips are rolling against her without my conscious bidding. I’m biting my lip, I realize belatedly, and when I force myself to stop she kisses me long and hard and deep, leaving gently fading tooth-marks on my bottom like and a serious case of butterflies scurrying up my back. “Roan,” she says, voice low and breathy and utterly enticing, “I would love it if you were my girlfriend,” she says. She manages to get through the whole thing before we break into helpless giggles, but once we’ve caught our breath I kiss her and nod.

“Okay,” I tell her. “We’re dating now. So you’d better not die, alright? That’s very bad manners. Not a good way to treat your girlfriend.”

I mean it as a joke but I can see worry mar her pretty face and I regret it instantly and try to walk it back. “Hey, wait, I didn’t – I was joking.”

“What about you?” she asks. “I can’t leave you down here, I just can’t, what if you –“

“Elena, I don’t like it either,” I tell her, tucking my hand up beneath her tank top. Her back is sweaty and muscular. “But what choice do we have? Erica isn’t going to let both of us go. I don’t even know if she’ll let you go. But, goddam it,” I say, feeling resolve like steel hardening inside me, “I’m going to make her. Whatever I have to say, however I have to finagle it, I’ll get you out of here. I promise.”

“But –“

“Elena, shut up.”

“But –“ she starts again, and I give her a look.

“I need you up there,” I tell her. “To give me something to keep my head up. To keep me from going insane down here. I don’t know how I’ll get out of it and come back to you, but I will. I promise.”

“That’s really sweet,” Erica says from behind us, and I jump hard and hit Elena in the jaw with my shoulder, and as she is clutching it and cursing I bolt out of bed and storm up to Erica, feeling embarrassed and furious and murderous all at once. Elena is calling after me, sounding desperate, telling me to wait, and she starts to clamber out of bed as well but she must have moved too quickly because I hear her hiss in pain and fall back into the cot.

“You fucking bitch,” I spit at Erica. She doesn’t have her revolver, not in her hand at least; maybe it’s tucked into the holster at her waist, maybe it’s with Marcus outside. I don’t care; I’d be just as mad if she’d been pointing it straight at me. She looks at me levelly as I lay into her, calling her every name I can think of. “She could have died,” I finish, pointing back to Elena. “She could have fucking died.”

“She did attack Marcus,” Erica points out. I am so livid that everything has a faint tinge of red to it, that I can feel a vein pulsing in the side of my throat. Before I can say anything even worse to her Erica raises her hands from her sides; they’re empty. “I came to apologize,” she says, and it is so unexpected that it puts a little ice on my anger. I give her a dubious look and she nods. “I did, really,” she says, pressing gently past me before I can decide whether or not I’ll throttle her as she moves within arms’ reach of me, and sits heavily in the other cot, across from Elena, who turns away pointedly.

“I have been,” Erica starts, then trails off. “Making some mistakes,” she finishes heavily. “With this whole thing. Ever since I shot that man up at the middle of the Cord –“

“His name was Reuben,” Elena says, and Erica swallows. I realize, suddenly, that I am only just now learning the Sergeant’s full name.

“Reuben,” she says. “I never wanted to – I never wanted to shoot anybody. I never wanted to _kill_ anybody. I –“

“And you hit Roan,” Erica continues. There is a tight knot of anger in her voice. Her hand is curled into a fist. She looks ready to spring out of the cot.

“A couple times,” I point out, before Erica can say anything. “And you called Elena stupid,” I say, glancing back at her. It sounds incredibly insignificant the instant after I say it but Elena smiles at me, a brief flash, the smile lines around her eyes crinkling.

“I don’t have any excuses,” Erica says, in a very small voice. “I’m sorry. To both of you. I was terrified, I didn’t think we would run into anybody, and then he – Reuben – opened the door right in front of us and I shot him. I didn’t think about it, I just reacted.”

Elena has her eyes shut. I can tell she’s trying not to but something in her understands what Erica is saying, something in her _knows_ where Erica is speaking from. I think again of the look in Elena’s eyes when she told me that Peter had, indirectly, caused her to have to kill a man.

“I don’t have any excuse for hitting you,” she tells me. Her gaze is too intense; I can’t meet it. “I hate myself for hitting you,” she says, “but I was terrified that if you didn’t think I meant it, that if you didn’t think I’d kill you if I had to you’d try and get away and then this whole thing would collapse.”

I chew on that for a while. “That other day,” I say finally, “what were you really doing in my hotel room?” Elena throws me a questioning glance and I give her a little shake of my head accompanied by a shrug that I hope says I’ll explain later. Erica makes a face.

“I told the truth, for the most part. I wanted to know how much you knew, whether or not you were a part of the company, whether you going in with Peter was, I don’t know, some kind of sting to get your hands on him, and by extension me. It was pure coincidence, you and Veret coming in when you did. I wasn’t waiting for you, it was just bad timing.”

“You freaked,” I say slowly, thinking about it. “You were certain that we were on to you, that Makado called to try and lure you back.”

Erica nods after a moment.

“Why’d you call her back?” I ask. Erica frowns.

“When?”

“She told me you called back a day later. Said you were sorry and everything.”

“Oh,” she says. “I was trying to make her think that I was on the run still, while I was here getting ready to come down.”

“How did you get in?” Elena asks. Erica and I both look over at her. “You must know about another orifice somewhere. You can’t have gotten in the main one, and that break in the fence near the gate has been filled in, I saw them doing it.”

Erica nods but doesn’t offer anything further than that. I shake my head.

“You really believe in this, don’t you?” I ask her. “You really think making sure that the Company doesn’t get their hands on another one of those crystals is so important that –“

“Burt showed me,” Erica says, her voice suddenly forceful. “I didn’t believe him when he told me about them but he showed me, one night after hours when we were supposed to just be there for the hot springs he took me to that room and showed me the crystals hooked up to that machine and I – I could feel it. It was like there was something there, something _alive_ in that room. And it was being choked to death but I couldn’t put a finger on it, couldn’t point to it, I could just feel it writhing and pleading somewhere in the middle of my head.”

She looks at us. Her eyes are dark, unreadable. Her voice is very bleak. “They never knew where the crystals came from, you know. There’s bullshit in the reports about it but it’s made up. They say it’s part of the Pit’s digestive system but if that was true there’d be more of them, you’d be able to go to a specific organ and find them, see them being formed. You can’t. They’ve gone through as much of it as they can looking for more and there aren’t any.”

Outside the ranger station, the Pit groans. I think about it, about the enormity of it, the bulk of it lying undisturbed beneath miles and miles of the hot Texas soil, stretching maybe all the way back home to Corpus Christi. I think about the dream I had and the panic I had felt when I considered that maybe it wasn’t a dream, maybe it was a vision of things to come.

I find, to my incredible surprise, that I am inclined to believe Erica. That whatever she saw or heard or felt in that secret room with the Company’s ace in the hole spooked her so badly that she’d do anything to keep them from replicating it.

I look at Erica, stare at her until I catch her gaze, then hold it unblinking. “I’ll come with you,” I tell her. “And I’ll help you if I can. But you have to let Elena go. Let her leave and get to the surface and get medical attention.”

“Roan,” Elena says from behind me, and the way she says my name is like a tree breaking in a storm, like something collapsing, and I can feel it tearing at her, the thought of me staying down here. I squeeze my eyes shut.

“Please, Erica,” I ask. “I don’t want her to get hurt any more. I want her to be okay.”

Erica blows a breath out, and I crack my eyes open. After what feels like forever she nods. “Okay,” she says, barely loud enough for me to hear, and that does it, I start crying, half out of relief and half out of fear, and then Elena is getting up gingerly. She sits down next to me and puts her arms around me and holds me, and I know that however long it lasts will not be long enough.


	13. Chapter 13

“Jesus,” Erica breathes, “you weren’t kidding,” and I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

I’ve managed to keep my heartrate under control all the way down to the barrows but now that we’re here I’m able to let my breath out and relax a little, ironically. The place is a graveyard, a grisly butcher’s workshop of stinking ichor and dismembered copepods. It is unearthly quiet, even down here in the middle of the Pit’s guts, with the only sound being the dripping of glutinous white phlegm-like vital fluids and occasionally a far-off groan from the Pit’s musculature.

The copepods are everywhere, strewn all over the place like ragdolls, and very few of them are intact. The majority have had their arms ripped off and a ragged hole bored straight through the middle of their armored faceplate that looks like it goes several feet deep at least. Here and there there are dead leeches, the only trace of the leechman, the only thing giving any clue as to what might have happened her. I briefly wish that I still had my camera with me.

Saying goodbye to Elena had made me acutely aware that I may not have been prepared for what I was getting myself into. I had helped her out of the cot and she had stumbled and cried out and then I caught her, prepared for the worst, already starting to panic – had I done a bad job? Had I hurt her somehow while I was tending to her wounds and only now was she able to feel the effects of it, getting up and moving around?

Elena had looked at me, lips already curling into a sheepish grin, and then she must have seen the look on my face and stopped, stood there straight without any assistance from me and then put her hands on my face and cupped me to her and kissed me so long and so hard that I felt a little faint. Erica had coughed behind us, a little uncomfortably, but when we finally broke apart I really had eyes only for Elena, I couldn’t stop staring at her, at the freckles across her cheeks, at the way one of the corners of her lips lifted slightly higher than the other when she smiled, at a dozen little things like that that I wanted to fix in my mind.

I don’t think I really knew, not consciously, at least, why I made such an effort to keep a clear image of her in my head then, to get every detail down in as complete a manner as I could. It only became apparent to me once we had walked out to the Cord and Elena had opened the door and turned around and waved to me before disappearing that I had been so concerned with her safety that I had had no concern at all for mine.

The door clanged shut and Marcus had spun the wheel to seal it tightly and then Elena was gone. Before she left we had hugged again, there in Oyster’s Shame, amid the glistening walls and the sounds of more of the tiny pearly deposits falling here and there like a soft distant rain. “You come back to me,” she had growled, right into my ear, and I could feel her leave a wet spot on my cheek from where she had begun to cry, and I wanted so badly to go with her but I didn’t see any way I could.

“Well,” I had said to Erica, forcing myself to sound brighter than I had felt, “let’s get this over with.”

So we did.

Marcus kicks one of the dead leeches and it rolls a little. It looks like it has some weight to it, some heftiness that isn’t immediately apparent from its slenderness. It’s about the length of my arm. “What the hell is this, E?” he asks, looking up at her, and Erica shakes her head, getting down on her haunches to examine it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she says. “It’s a little bit like a gastric bristleworm but not as…I don’t know, bristly.”

I’m standing there in the back with my arms folded, waiting. Next to me is the stinking corpse of a copepod; this one has been crushed, its insides, ropy and white, flooding out in a great mass from its burst sides. Even with the helmet up I can smell it; Erica and Marcus must have cast-iron stomachs. Erica does, anyway; when we first made it down to the barrows we’d had to stop for a moment to let Marcus vomit.

The tracking PDA had lead us almost exactly the way we’d gone the day before, back before everything had gone to hell. I still don’t know exactly what had kicked it off to begin with; my best guess was that the Leechman had showed up and gone on a rampage just after we’d left with the crystal, and the copepods, they must have assumed that it was our fault, that we’d drawn it here or were somehow working with it. Did they know what it was? Did they recognize it? I wish the Big Guy were still around to ask but we had passed his desiccated, punctured corpse, recognizable only by the stump of one of its wrists, as we had made our way through the central chamber. Marcus is carrying the Sergeant’s slug rifle but he does so nervously, as though he’s afraid of it. He clearly isn’t familiar with the thing. I wonder what’ll happen if he does have to fire it, if it’ll just put him on his ass or if it’ll actually break a bone.

The two of them have been decent to me so far. Erica seems genuinely regretful about hitting me earlier; she doesn’t look at me most of the time, and if she does need me for something, mainly to use the suit computer to look at a map, she asks for me politely and in a soft voice. I thought that Marcus might curse at me or harbor some kind of ill-feeling; after all, Elena – after all, my _girlfriend_ attacked him, and I have no doubt that if she had been able to get away with it she likely would have shot the both of them and washed her hands of it.

The thought makes me shudder very slightly, but not of fear or anger but just vague baseless exhilaration, of minor and muted joy that things are finally happening, for better or for worse, for good or ill, that great capital-letter THINGS WILL CHANGE finally rolling over and putting muscle behind its epitaph.

I had been terrified on the way down that the copepods would have torn us apart, would have eaten us. I had no confidence in Erica and Marcus’ ability to protect this little illicit expedition. They have no plan, no notion of what might be waiting for them. And I don’t know what they intend to do if they do actually manage somehow to get their hands on the crystal. Break it? But that’d be counterproductive, wouldn’t it, as if what Erica’s saying is right, that’d just give us that psychic illness.

If I don’t have it already. Was that dream a dream or the start of it? Is it –

No, stop. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s the perfectly normal sort of dream to have when you’re under this much stress, in these conditions. Once you’re out of here, once you’ve – Christ, I don’t know, gotten Elena some vacation time or sick leave or whatever the hell and spent the rest of your savings taking her to fucking Tahiti or somewhere, if you’re still having the dreams then, you can worry about it.

I could tell them, I could tell Erica and Marcus. It’d be easy. I could just say something like, ‘hey, uh, so there’s this giant fucking ogre made out of leeches wandering around down here and it’s got the crystal you’re after, and it killed all these copepods. Oh, and the crystal weighs about a ton and we had to get a robot to carry it, which I notice you guys didn’t bring with you. No, you can’t use our robot, it’s probably smashed to bits somewhere.’

They wouldn’t believe me. There’s no way in hell they’d believe me. Even if I did want to save their asses, which at the moment is not very high up on my priority list. I’m still maintaining the faint hope that they might actually find the damn Leechman and try to get into a fight with it, which would be my cue to run like hell.

“Roan,” Erica asks me, again using that mildly infuriating soft and considerate voice, “have you seen one of these before?” She’s holding the body of the leech out to me, grasping it like one might hold a snake, right behind the head. Its mouth gapes insanely wide and round and the body hangs limp. I can’t stop myself from taking a step backwards.

Goddam it, Erica.

“Leechman,” I say, and then I cough. Our eyes meet for the first time in a half hour. “The Leechman’s here.”

Erica’s eyes seem to grow instantly deeper. Her mouth is open slightly, and she stares at me in silence until Marcus nudges her, his eyes flicking between her and me. “What’s the leechman?” he asks, and Erica, broken out of her reverie, licks her lips and glances over at him.

“Nothing,” she tells him, getting to her feet quickly. “A fairy tale. Like the boogeyman.”

Marcus doesn’t believe this; I can tell from the way he looks at her, but he doesn’t question it, just gets to his feet as well and follows her as she pulls out the tracking PDA, taps at the screen a few times, and then points down at one of the darkened vents. “That way,” she says, and where she points we follow.

We make our winding way through the ass-end of the barrows, the part we hadn’t gone through yesterday, and then the trail takes a corkscrewing, winding path downwards. We are very clearly in a section of the Pit that people have not been in very often. Even in the sections leading up to the barrows, where the flesh of the vents is left bare and uncovered, there are still lights strung here and there, little radio repeaters and every now and then a tiny, cramped-looking ranger station, mostly mothballed and closed-off, but still evidence that someone had come before us. In the barrows, though, this stopped entirely. There were little trails of cleat-marks here and there, but I think the majority of them were from us stomping through earlier, they looked too fresh, too new.

We only saw a couple of copepods, and these from far off, across vast chasms of flesh, scarred here and there like cliff-faces. I couldn’t divine their purpose, just – anomalies of anatomy, no meaning, no clear analogue I can draw. Just places where the flesh falls away and vague misty nothing takes its place. As I stand on the precipice looking over and down into darkness, watching the way my flashlight beam peters out depressingly soon, I swear that for a moment I can see something moving around, something large, fluttering and flapping and swooping like some kind of giant bat, but if anything was there, it vanished so quickly as to not leave an impression on me other than a brief glimpse of _size_ and frantic _motion_.

I turned back to see if Marcus or Erica had seen any of it but they were huddled together, deep in conversation, hunched over the PDA. After a moment I traipsed over to join them. With each step on the way down I had felt my weariness building, both in my body and in my heart – I had shoved so much out of the way down somewhere inside of me where I didn’t have to feel it, and it was only now that it was beginning to creep back out at me.

We’d passed some things I’d recognized from the rest of the squad – there was a torn piece of a suit there, in a small knurled corner, dirty and speckled with red matter that might have been blood or bits of flesh. I didn’t look closely enough to check. A boot, cleated firmly into the ground. Nothing as definite as a body; the closest I saw was a great foaming gout of blood splashed across the floor and up part of the wall of the vent, but no indication as to whether it came from a person, from a member of the team, from Klaus or Euler or – or Peter, or whether it was just natural, some artery in the floor being clipped during the fighting and spraying everywhere until capillary action cut it off.

If I think about it I won’t be able to go on. I can’t bear to –

Alright, Roan. Easy girl. Deal with it later. Right now just focus on staying alive. Get back to Elena and then you can cry about things. God, poor Peter, though; and poor Makado, waiting for him. How would I feel if it had been me up there and Elena down here?

I think of her, alone, making her way up the Cord, no weapon, still hurting, probably, as the painkiller starts to wear off, and I bite my lip, hard. Goddam it, I’m not going to cry. Not down here. She’s fine, she’s going to be perfectly fine. She knows how to handle herself.

I focus instead on the ache in my knees, in my back, in my arms. We’ve been going for so long, it feels like; hours upon hours. I’d check the time on the wrist computer but these damn gloves - !

Erica and Marcus look tired as well, at least. Maybe they’ll want to rest soon. We’ll be able to eat, sleep perhaps…they have to have some kind of tent, or sleeping bags, or something, even if it’s not one of the fancy hexagonal ones the squad used. I think about pointing out that we’re all dog tired, we might as well take a break before we go further, but I nix that idea quickly – I don’t want to seem weak. Erica’s given the impression that she won’t push me but Marcus is still a wild card, I don’t know him, how he handles stress, how he’ll act in a couple of hours when he’s even more tired and hungry.

They gesture and lead on, and I follow, dead on my feet but still forcing myself to continue.

And then, after fifteen minutes of walking, down treacherous polyped inclines, past outcroppings of redundant, keratinous spines, we find, laying in a slump with his neck at an awkward unnatural angle, his eyes terribly bright and aware, Euler.

I cry out when I see him; my stomach makes a horrible lurch as I take in the gnawed markings dotting his once-bright ranger suit, round and puckered and blood-crusted. The leeches have been at him but left him alive for some inscrutable reason. He coughs as we shine our lights on him and shifts feebly but he is unable to move more than an inch or two – his spine is clearly broken.

I hadn’t expected to find any bodies; somehow I had guessed that one way or another, anyone lost down here would be utterly irretrievable. But there is Euler, the one person I would never have expected to survive – I guess I underestimated him.

Or perhaps his current condition isn’t really _surviving_ in the main sense. Once I’ve gathered my senses I rush to him and kneel there beside him. I have nothing to offer him, no painkillers, no first aid, nothing besides companionship, but it’s better than standing and gawking as Erica and Marcus seem to be satisfied with. I wipe his forehead with my gloved palm lightly, the sweat shining on the rubber in the wake of my flashlight, and Euler’s eyes shift up to meet mine and he croaks out my name in a hoarse voice. He says it wrong, like it were one syllable, but hearing someone I care about even infinitesimally say it is like breathing after being underwater.

“Euler,” I tell him, and my voice breaks just a tiny bit right at the end. I lick my lips and try again. “Euler, what the hell happened to you?”

“I’m – it’s bad, Roan,” he says. _Rone_. Should have changed my name in that rebellious phase, added that accent mark I always longed for. There’d be less ambiguity. I smile to myself in spite of everything and he grins at me, just a little bit, but his eyes stay wide and frightened. They flick over to Erica and Marcus, and I look back at them as well, and then give an exasperated sigh.

“Don’t you two have any damn medical things? A first aid kit?” They glance at each other. “Anything?”

“I thought you might…” Euler coughs. “Might have come to rescue us.”

I frown. Us?

“Euler, are there…more people from the squad down here? Hurt somewhere?”

He shakes his head minutely, then winces. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to touch him without hurting him. I tear my glove off with my teeth, just lay my hand against his cheek. It feels like an awkwardly intimate gesture but I don’t know what else to do, I don’t know how else to help. If it were me I think I’d – I think I’d want human contact, something skin to skin. I think it might be a comfort.

“What happened?” I whisper.

“The Leechman,” he says, “it – it grabbed me and then it –“

He cries out, gently, and I move my hand downward and grab his. He clutches at me desperately. The last time I had seen him the leeches had been streaming into his open mouth, writhing against him, wrapping him like a hundred pythons at once. I bite my lip and glare back at Erica again. “Will you two fucking _do something_?”

“He’s clearly past any help we could give him,” Erica says, and Marcus nods.

For a very brief moment I am so intensely angry I feel as though I might burst into flame. Euler cries out softly again and I realize I have squeezed his hand too hard, and I jerk my hand back from his, muttering a stammered apology. He shakes his head.

“They’re right, I’m done for,” he tells me. “You should – you’re going down further?” he asks, frowning, and I nod.

“Those two want the crystal,” I tell him, lowering my voice a little.

“It went…that way,” he says, glancing to the right, further down the vent and into the Pit’s depths. We sit there in silence for a moment longer and then finally work up enough nerve to ask him the question I wanted to.

“Are you in pain?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “It feels like I should be but it’s just dull.” He breathes heavily. “I’m afraid.”

“Euler, don’t –“

“I’m going to die down here,” he says, and there is a terrible layer of finality in his voice that makes my heart fall.

“No, Euler, you’re not –“ I start, but then cut myself off. Because he’s right, isn’t he? I can’t argue with him, there’s no way in hell that we’re going to be able to get him out of here. If he has a broken neck there’s no fucking way we could stabilize him well enough to carry him out of here, and even if we could, I’d need Erica and Marcus’ help, which they don’t seem incredibly inclined to give me. I look back at them and start to get up, but Euler catches the cuff of my suit and I stop, hunkered over awkwardly.

“Roan, I saw – “

He coughs; I can see his chest heaving. I wonder about those leeches; I know I saw them flooding into his mouth, forcing their way down his throat…what would have –

“I saw inside it,” he tells me. I frown.

“Inside what?”

“The Leechman,” he says. His eyes are boring into mine with a horrible intensity, practically bulging outwards. “I saw inside it and – and it was so bright –“

“Euler, I don’t know what you –“

“Don’t leave me down here,” he says quietly, and then lets go. There is a pleading in his eyes that stops me dead. I’ve let my mouth fall open slightly, but there is no mistaking what he means, there is no ambiguity in the quiet desperation in his tone. He wants me to –

I get up quickly. My hands are shaking and my arms and legs feel like I’ve been whipped with a coil of lightning. I walk over to Erica and Marcus, and Erica nods at me. “You ready to go?” she asks, and I shake my head. I open my mouth and try to talk but I choke a little, then cough and try it again.

“Erica, Euler, he –“

“What is it?”

I shut my eyes. “Kill him,” I tell her. “He asked me to but I can’t – I can’t do that. He’s scared and he doesn’t want to have to lay down here unable to move for a couple more days before something fucking eats him or he dies of exposure. Please.”

Erica’s eyes are very dark. She glances at Marcus, then back at me, before she reaches down to her belt and unsnaps the holster there, then hands me the revolver. I nearly drop it; it’s heavier than I had expected. “Do it yourself,” she tells me. Her voice is like glass. “We’ve wasted enough time here already.”

“You – “ I start, but I choke it back. She’s trusting me giving me the revolver; this _means_ something to her. This is a test. But what am I supposed to do? Can I –

 _But you already did once before_ , some part of me whispers at the back of my head. _Remember Rey? He’s dead because of you_.

Marcus is covering me with his own slim little pistol. I swallow hard and try not to feel the imprint of its muzzle, covering me from five, seven, ten feet away from me, my back itching as I half-expect to hear a report and feel a sharp shock –

But nothing happens. I make it to Euler; he’s watching me, his eyes rolled upwards in a manner that somehow distinctly reminds me of a dog, somehow, and I hate myself for thinking so, but he’s looking at me in the same way a dog will look up at you, not moving its head, its eyes wide and hopeful.

I thought the gun might feel better in my hand after I’d had it there for a while, but it’s still awkward and heavy and purposeful. It’s much heavier than the pistol they’d given me to practice with during qualifications back on the range a few days ago; that one hadn’t even felt like a gun, it hadn’t felt _real_. This one most certainly does.

Euler nods at me infinitesimally. “It’s…alright,” he says. He seems to be laboring a bit more now; maybe he hadn’t been expending very much energy until we came across him. I certainly didn’t hear any cries for help on the walk up. If he’d been there the whole time, for _hours_ , listening to the Leechman and the copepods duke it out…

“Euler,” I say, “what did you mean when you said you saw _inside_ the Leechman?”

“Roan,” he says. His eyes are fixed on the revolver. I’m stalling, I realize; I’m putting it off so that maybe somehow this responsibility will be removed from me. The inside of my mouth is very dry and I swallow hard, willing some moisture to return to it.

“Okay,” I say quietly. _Okay_ , I think to myself. I take the revolver, hold it in two hands, one on the handle, the barrel resting in the palm of my other hand. I look at the cylinder, fumble for a moment before that trip all those years ago with my dad comes back to me and I find the catch and swing it outwards. Erica hasn’t reloaded since she shot Elena, I note, some dull part of my mind logging the information without any further comment. I can see the tiny mark of the struck primer on one of the cartridges. But I won’t find any salvation here, there are still five more shots that are perfectly serviceable.

I click it shut, remembering, as my dad told me, not to flick it closed, not to spin it. You aren’t a cowboy, he’d said to me gravely, pressing the gun into my chest. It had smelled like oil and metal, like something functional, like when you open the hood of your car. And I had trembled then as I am now, and I had looked out across the flat open expanse of grass –

Even then I couldn’t bear to think of it after I’d done it.

I’m stalling.

Goddam it, Roan, goddam you and your willingness to stick your neck out.

Euler makes a small noise beneath me and I look down at him. “Are you sure?” I ask, willing him to say no, to rethink it, to give me a reprieve. He nods.

“Just do it,” he says. “They won’t come get me, they won’t care. Just do it.”

“Okay,” I breathe, and then I hold the gun in two hands – why does it come back to me so easily? – and put it up very close to his forehead, and Euler shuts his eyes, and I shut mine as well. I inhale and then exhale.

Five minutes later I hear feet squelching up behind me and then Marcus is crouching next to me and prying the gun from my nerveless hands. “It’s okay,” he says, not unkindly, and then he is gently pushing me out of the way. I get to my feet, not knowing what else to do. I meet Euler’s eyes and I start to say something, then I stop. There is no blame in them, or maybe I don’t want to see blame. So instead I turn around and hunch myself against the wall, and when the gunshot finally sounds I flinch, and then I finally let myself cry.

When I turn back around I can’t bring myself to look at him. I instead watch Marcus hand the revolver back to Erica, watch Erica slip it back into the holster, watch Marcus shove his pistol into the waistband of his heavy-duty jeans. I blurt out the only thing that comes to my mind and tell him that he shouldn’t carry one in the chamber like that, it’s dangerous, and Marcus gives me a pitying look and says nothing. When I meet Erica’s eyes they are lighter than before and I realize, with a shudder as another wave of tears rolls soundlessly down my cheeks, that whatever test there was, whatever reason made her give me the revolver, I passed.

And then we stomp off into the darkness and leave poor Euler behind.

* * *

The next day I feel better. I slept better than I thought I might have, sandwiched between Erica and Marcus in their tent, cramped and with not enough air mattresses or sleeping bags, but I managed. They shared some of their food with me, MREs scavenged from some surplus store somewhere, which I found faintly comforting, and then the next day, when someone’s alarm blared and woke us, I was disconcertingly and surprisingly fresh-feeling. All the pain and sorrow I thought might have come boiling out of me when I let my guard down never did, and instead it was replaced with a calm, warm, faintly comforting deadness. I was, I realize now, preparing on some level to die. I had arrived at a zenlike state that had me convinced I was either dead or dreaming, a fragile state of mind that I had tried so hard to reach at that dojo in Oklahoma but which constantly eluded me.

I am complicit now in two murders, one arguably and one less so. When I think of myself the person I am is thorny and sharp-edged and armored and I do not recognize her when I hold her in my arms. I blow out a breath and pop my eyes open as Marcus nudges me and hands me a cup of bootleg espresso made from two freeze-dried pouches, and I take it gratefully and even manage to smile at him. I feel…clean.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

More walking, more bypasses across stinking rivers of digested slurry, more crawling across meter-wide cords of banded muscle. The anatomy gets stranger and stranger, more open, more wild. Nerves like waving cilia, waggling at us like anemones, retract at lightspeed at our approach. Everything is luminescent down here, everything glows, but what glows brightest of all is the rectangular blocky backlight of Erica’s PDA, guiding us forward like a north star. She seems less certain of it, less sure; she stops and consults with Marcus every now and then and I feel fairly frequently like I have simply been forgotten, like I am an insurance policy for the return trip, a hostage kept in waiting to be revealed and used as leverage later on.

Will Makado care, I wonder, when she knows that they’ve taken me? I hope she will. I think we got close enough that she would. I think she likes me.

Does she like me enough to send a team after me? I’m sure there’s some kind of tracking device in this suit but will it even function this deep down? I don’t know.

I stub my toe on a bloated adipose swelling and it belches a gout of rank, sticky fluid on me. We pause again for Marcus to vomit.

Eventually we make it to a curled, winding passageway, a tight intestinal-feeling loop that circles in on itself over and over again, the tissue struggling against us at every turn, that we have to claw and scrape and crawl through but that the PDA swears is the right way to go, the simplified arrow logo spinning back around and directing us back in every time we think of turning around and trying someplace else. We push through and through until finally it vomits us out, breathing hard and covered in blood and strands of pale-white membrane, and then we stop, eyes wide, staring up and up and up at the space we’ve found ourselves in.

It’s enormous, the size of a stadium and at least twice or maybe three times as deep, great gnarled coils of sparking nerves weaving in and out of the fleshy, irregular walls casting macabre light in regular snaking patterns across the broad flat plate of bone that divides the space nearly in half, knotty and bulging and thick, honeycombed and dripping with thick resinous marrow.

There are things moving, I realize, on the far-off floor of the chasm, great writhing worms or – no, no, they have legs. Squat lizard-like figures, then, moving in fits and starts, their flesh a glistening pale sickly color, like milk that’s gone off. Every now and then they fall on each other and tear each other limb from limb and dozens flock over the place where the unlucky one fell. They must be simply enormous for us to be able to see them from this distance. I glance back at Erica and Marcus; their mouths are open, dumbstruck as well – they must not have known this was here. Could we be the first to find this place?

I watch a shadow, a patchy midnight cutout, detach itself from the bone plate and fall swooping to the floor of the chasm, and then it wings its way back up, one of the lizards caught in its claws, dangling beneath like a rabbit caught by a hawk. I watch, overwhelmed, as the – the thing, whatever it is, I want to call it a bird but it can’t be, it simply _can’t_ be – flutters ungainly and graceless back to the bone and vanishes with its prey into a whorled hole in the side, ragged and uneven.

“What is this place?” I mutter to Erica, after I’ve regained enough of my senses to think to speak, and she shakes her head faintly.

“I have no idea,” she tells me, but before I can say anything else I hear a noise from above us; a subtle noise, like a whistling, drawn-out gasp, and when I look upwards I can only see a diving, dark-furred silhouette with outstretched, foot-long claws and a hungry, slavering mouth.

I don’t have time to scream.


	14. Chapter 14

It turns out, however, that I didn’t need to. As I cower and make a half-hearted, dog-tired attempt to throw myself to the side, the – well, the bird, I guess, whatever the hell it is – swoops just next to me, close enough to feel a better of greasy wings against my back, knocking me to the ground with one powerful downswing, and then it juts its claws forward and digs them into Marcus. He shrieks; his gun clatters squelchily to the gnarled floor and he flails in the thing’s grip; it’s holding him by the shoulder and by the hip, and for a moment, just a singular moment, it glares at us balefully, its squat, recessed head and luminous eyes swiveling over us, before it adjusts its grip on Marcus briefly and then pushes itself powerfully into the air again, winging into the darkness. Marcus’s screams recede quickly, and I am left open-mouthed on the ground, heart pounding, my entire body shaking as I come hesitantly off the adrenaline. Erica is trying to get a bead on the thing with her revolver but her hand is too unsteady, and I reach out for her and cry out for her not to shoot, and she glances down at me quickly. Her eyes are wide and panicked and I realize that this is the first time I’ve seen her lose her cool. Even in the hotel room she was completely locked down.

“Erica,” I say urgently, “if you shoot that gun every _thing_ down here is going to know exactly where we are.”

I give the murky ceiling a glance filled with trepidation then get to my feet slowly. My foot nudges against something – Marcus’ gun. I look down at it and then up at Erica; she raises the revolver again and points it at me.

“I’m just going to pick it up,” I tell her.

“Don’t.”

“Erica, I am _not_ going around unarmed down here. You can either let me pick the gun up or we can just shoot each other right now and get it over with. What’s it going to be?”

A nice speech, I guess. Maybe it’d have more impact if I had more than about an ounce of energy to deliver it with. Whatever rest I’d managed to get has been depleted by now and my legs and arms and back are aching as before. _I need to get out of this goddam place_ , I think to myself, but even my thoughts don’t have any energy to them, everything flits around very enervated and airy.

Erica is still staring at me and I bend down, very slowly, and pick the gun up. I hold it between thumb and forefinger, keeping my eyes locked on her, and then stick it slowly into the front pocket on the suit. “Alright?” I ask, and she swallows, then nods.

“Marcus,” she starts, and I look up again, shake my head.

“He’s gone,” I tell her. Stating the obvious.

“I didn’t think he’d –“ she starts, and then she cuts herself off. She wipes at her eyes hurriedly and then pulls out the PDA again, points down the slope. “That way,” she tells me, and I nod.

The way down becomes gradually easier, the slope levelling out into a long rough bumpy undergrowth of muck and slime. Mushrooms bud down here, great towering broad-capped things the size of small trees, and I feel a little safer, at least, knowing that any of the birds that might be circling above, glaring down and looking for prey, probably won’t be able to see us beneath their wide fleshy brims. They grow thick, too, leaving us to pick and push our way through them, struggling against their elastic, fibrous meat. Paths trail here and there but they are meandering and circuitous and dirty, piled with organic detritus – pieces of mushroom, guano from the birds above, foamy congealed blood from where sores in the Pit’s skin have rubbed open. The air is thick and sour and revolting and I can see Erica taking shallow breaths through her mouth. She wipes her eyes frequently but I can’t tell if it’s because they’re stinging or because she is mourning Marcus. After maybe fifteen minutes of pushing through mushroom stalks in silence I reach out for her and catch her by the hand lightly, and then flinch as she whips around, the pistol coming up.

“Relax,” I tell her quickly, showing her my empty hands, “it’s just me.”

“What is it?”

“I, um,” I start, wondering immediately why I’m bothering, “I just wanted to say sorry. For Marcus.”

She stares at me for a moment longer before she nods rather stiffly. “Thanks,” she says. The silence stretches onward until I look away.

“If you want to talk about it…”

Erica stays silent for about five minutes, and I assume that that is her way of turning down my offer. I don’t know why I even bothered, really, especially for her – why try and comfort the person holding you hostage? Stupid, Roan.

Then Erica turns and sags against a broad mushroom stalk and gives me a dark, hopeless glower. “Marcus was one of the first people who joined the little group I run back in town,” she says. I squat down on my haunches, shut my eyes and then unlock whatever lingering bone of resignation is running cordlike through my conscience and then lean back into the muck until I’m half-supine, propped against a stalk of my own. I can feel the fingerlength-deep layer squish and shift beneath my ass in a decidedly unpleasant way but the relief of not having to be on my feet any longer wins out in the end.

“The cult,” I nod, cracking an eye open to watch her. I see a spasm of anger flit across her face.

“It isn’t a cult,” she snaps, and then I see her relax and let it go. “It isn’t a cult,” she repeats, more calmly. “It was never a cult, we don’t fucking _worship_ the Pit. It was just about – about having something there that was bigger than yourself. A frame of reference. You wouldn’t understand.”

I roll my eyes at her but she isn’t looking. My eyes hurt, rolling upwards like that. Closing them doesn’t help much. “Why’d you bring him down here?” I ask.

“I needed someone to help me. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get the crystal by myself, I’d need backup of some kind at least. Of all of us I trusted Marcus the most, and I figured he was the most capable outdoorsman. The others, well, there aren’t a ton of them, and most of them have more on their plate. Marcus is – was,” she corrects, her voice growing raw, “like me, he didn’t have many attachments, didn’t have a ton to tie him down.”

Oh. That would do it.

“I’m – sorry,” I say, surprising myself with the amount of delicacy I’m able to muster. “I know it can be hard to lose someone you love, it can…”

I let myself trail off. Erica’s eyes have grown harder. “We weren’t lovers,” she tells me. “I felt…responsible for him,” she says. She pulls out a battered pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I feel myself practically salivating for one, despite my best efforts. Erica notices and tosses the pack to me, and I murmur my thanks and let her light it for me. I cough a little at first but then it comes back to me and I really do feel better. This and some coffee, maybe…

Erica shakes her head. “Goddam it,” she mutters quietly, in a way I recognize so deeply I can feel it in my bones, and for a moment, just a moment, I’m able to feel sorry for her. Then I remember that she shot Elena and I can go back to hating her.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her again. I try not to think about what Marcus must have felt, feeling those foot-long talons sinking into him, probably dying from the instant they had gone in. It would have crippled him, that one in the shoulder, he would never have been able to use it effectively again without a lot of surgery. I wince to myself, thinking about it. And then the other one in the gut – it must have been horrible. A horrible feeling, knowing that something like that is about to _do_ something to you that you can’t stop, can’t fight. It makes me shudder just to imagine it.

I look around warily; so far we haven’t seen any of those massive pale lizards but I can’t imagine they’d be any less aggressive than the birds. They have to eat something, after all, and if they’re that huge they have to eat a _lot_ of something.

“Tell me the truth,” Erica says. “Are you working for the Company?”

I blow out a big sigh and open my eyes, stare at her. “You really think I am?”

“Is it the FBI, then? What is it?”

“I’m just somebody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I tell her. “I’m just down here to take photos.”

“Makado wouldn’t have sent you down here for that,” Erica says. She sounds very confident. “There’s some angle she’s working, there’s some reason she’s got you down here. What are you –“

“How well do you know Makado?”

Erica shrugs. “Well enough, I guess.”

“What’s her middle name?”

“Not that well.”

I toss the cigarette on the ground. “If I’m here as part of her plan, it’s as a pawn. That’s all.”

“How reassuring,” Erica says dryly. “What about that blonde commando friend of yours, what’s the deal with you and her?”

“I thought it was obvious,” I murmur, and Erica laughs.

“Is that your partner?”

“Um. Well, I guess that’s one way to describe –“

“You know, your secret FBI partner.”

“Will you just let the whole FBI thing go?” I growl. “Fuckin’ Alex-Jones-ass –“

“I know the FBI is in town,” Erica says. “I think they’re investigating Makado. Or something she had to do with.”

I stop, look at Erica. She doesn’t appear to be joking, or leading me on. Her gaze is narrow but even. This is something she believes.

“This isn’t some, like, tinfoil hat shit, is it? Because if –“

“I don’t know what shit Peter talked about me while you two were shacked up –“

“We weren’t _shacked up_ –“

“Whatever,” Erica says, getting to her feet. She rounds on me, points an accusing finger at my slumped form. “I have it on very good authority that the FBI is here in Gumption. Peter might have talked about his sources inside the Company but I have my own, ones he didn’t know about, and they all tell me that something big is about to go down. This crystal thing, this is Makado’s Hail Mary shot.”

“What even was your plan, Erica?” I ask. The cigarette got me a little perked up at least but I can feel the fatigue lurking behind my eyeballs whenever I’m not focusing. “You come down with two people and get in a shootout with ten? What was the idea?”

Erica makes a sour face at me. “For your information,” she says, “I have a little more than just one other person on my side. And the plan was, I paid someone in security a lot of money to plot the route you guys were taking, so that it would pass through a path that has a sphincter with an exposed nerve ending right along the route you were slated to take on the return trip. We were going to hide there, wait until everybody but the one with the crystal came by, and then tickle the nerve and trap them on our side while we locked everyone else out. Then it’d have been easy to grab it.”

I frown. “Erica, how big do you think this crystal is?”

She gives me a nonplussed face. “Well, it’s –“ she starts, and then her eyes widen. I frown and then turn my head slowly, glance over at where her gaze seems to be going, and see the massive snub-nosed head of the pale, eyeless lizard that has pushed its way through the mushroom stalks and into our clearing flare its fist-sized nostrils and surge forward towards me.

I shriek and roll to the side, scrambling away from it through the muck, and to my immense surprise the lizard freezes and then takes a hesitant step backwards. It opens its mouth and a broad flat tongue flutters outward briefly. Its teeth are widely spaced, flat little enameled pegs like those of an elephant or hippopotamus. Herbivore teeth.

Wait a minute.

I look at the lizard, watch it closely. I open my mouth again, make a short hissing sound, the same kind I might make if I were trying to get a cat to go away from me, and it freezes again, mid-step, retreating backward. It has a narrow, shovel-like head, like one of those weird salamander-like lizards that live in pools in caves and have grown blind and pale and fat down there in the darkness. I don’t recall what they’re called.

“Erica,” I whisper, glancing back at her. She’s gotten to her feet, gotten her hand halfway to her holster. Her eyes flick down to mine. “They’re fucking _herbivores_ ,” I tell her. She looks at me like I’m crazy.

And then the lizard bulls its way further into the thicket and fixes its jaws around a particularly thick and succulent-looking mushroom stalk and bites it hard enough to snap it nearly in half. A froth of syrupy white sap or dew spreads over its thin lips as it eats, and then when it’s done it trundles off into the murk, leaving a trail of snapped stalks and giant flattened footprints.

“Well,” I say, getting to my feet. “Maybe not herbivores. Fungivores? Is that a word? Whoa –“

I break off. I feel utterly strange for a moment, like I’ve caught a bad headrush, but it fades after a moment.

“You alright?” she asks. I wait for a moment, probing the inside of my head like a sore spot in my mouth, but I nod.

“Yeah. I don’t think these spores are doing me many favors,” I say, rubbing my fingers together; everything down here has a fine layer of them, like a greyscaled snow, a light misting of it everywhere. It makes me a little nervous but I don’t see any way to avoid it, any way to protect myself. We’d left my helmet in the great pile of crap Erica and Marcus had taken from us back in the Cord.

“Better hurry, then,” Erica suggests, and I nod, and then we push onwards.

It’s hard work, but we get into the groove of it eventually; it’d be easier with a machete or something, but even without it the mushrooms aren’t as bad as trees or saplings or even the kind of jungle undergrowth and brush machetes are intended for. The mushrooms are soft and pliable, at least the young ones are; you can push them aside and the only thing you have to look out for is making sure that you keep a grip on them so they don’t spring back and whack you in the face. It’s easier with two people, and as Erica and I coordinate we begin to pick up the pace, at least until we get deeper into the – let’s call it the Fungal Jungle. It’s a stupid name but it’ll do. There, though, in the depths, the mushrooms are far too large to deal with in the same manner, but they’re spaced further apart, the vast trunks hardening and crusting and thickening so that you’d need a chainsaw to make space and fit between them with any degree of comfort. We end up forced onto the beaten paths and game trails that dot here and there between the stalks. There must be something here other than the lizards – hell, there must be an entire ecosystem down here, an entire food chain with the birds perched right at the top. The lizards must be like water buffalo or something, only maybe less aggressive, more cautious; that one we’d ran into earlier certainly seemed more inclined to flee than fight, even though it knew we were there. Or perhaps the only predators it has are the birds, maybe whatever other four-legged freaks there are down here only prey on each other and not the lizards.

Olms, that’s what they’re called. Except olms have only got two legs, I think, and they’re aquatic. Maybe they’re related? Distantly so?

My mind’s wandering. I let it to keep the tedium and physicality from sinking into me, soaking into my bones. As long as I can keep daydreaming about something cerebral I can stay sane. On alternating occasions I think having to think is the worst and the best thing about life.

We take breaks, we take frequent swigs from our dwindling supply of water, and I become more and more convinced that I’m never going to make it out of here, that I’m going to die to something really fucking stupid and I’m going to end up as a skull stripped bare along with a couple of other cracked bones in an overgrown owl pellet somewhere up in the canopy, just like Marcus, just like Erica. I ask her more questions about her plan, about the FBI, about anything I can think of to try and divine whether or not she’s a lunatic, but she either refuses to answer me or gives me responses that are infuriatingly sane and reasonable. They were going to strip the tracker from the crystal – easily enough, apparently, it comes with a quick-release – and then take the same way out as they went in and then fade, take the crystal somewhere far away and hide it so that the goddam gummint couldn’t take it and break it and make things worse everywhere for everybody. Of course they could have gotten away with it, she assures me, the Company’s funding is so lax that they’d never dare mention that they let one of the crystals get away, much less by a redneck clandestine operation like that.

I want to cry. I want to talk to Elena, I want to hold her. I hope very fervently that she’s okay, that she’s making it out, that everything is going to be okay for her. I maintain a faint hope that at some point the cavalry will come charging in with guns blazing but the more I listen to Erica talk with a faint derision about the absolute state of the Company right now, the more I doubt it. They won’t waste time or money on me, just mark me down for missing, presumed deceased, and forget about me. The only person I can rely on is me.

Can I do it? I muse ponderously, in between shallow breaths, calculate my odds and fudge in my favor as much as I can. I’ve got a stitch in my side and sometimes I put my hands wrong and Erica has to wait for me to reposition my grip to the side of a fungal thicket so she can pass through. She bears it with patience; she’s tired too, I can tell. But the PDA tells us the crystal is close.

The Leechman will be there, I tell her, and Erica shakes her head, stays silent. I can tell what she thinks of the Leechman; she doesn’t believe me. But when I had said it earlier she had reacted differently, she’d gotten a little spooked – she knows _of_ the Leechman, at least, that’s for sure, but she’s convinced herself I’m mistaken. How could I be right? The Leechman isn’t real, doesn’t exist, it’s a fairy tale.

And then, when we push past the next line of mushrooms and out into an unexpected clearing, we find the Leechman in the flesh, ten feet tall and just as wide, carrying the crystal like an awkwardly-shaped package beneath its arm. It stomps along, a faint glutinous slopping noise coming accompanied by the crushing thuds of its writhing feet. I look over at Erica, feeling faintly triumphant, and see her staring, open-mouthed, not so much at the Leechman, but at the trunk-sized, five-hundred-pound crystal it’s lugging. She shuts her mouth eventually and looks over at me. “I guess I see why you kept asking how big I thought it was,” she says, and I nod.

“Well, you did keep saying you had a plan,” I point out, and she squats and buries her face in her hands.

“Fuck,” she groans.

Out there across the clearing I hear a high whooping gasp and watch as one of the birds stoops, wings folded, at the Leechman, which seems to raise its abraded, conical head and regard the thing diving at it, and then it drops the crystal and reaches up and plucks the bird from the sky. “Holy shit,” I murmur, and Erica sits up and comes to stand next to me.

We watch in silence as the Leechman pins the struggling bird down on the floor and then vomits a stream of leeches into the bird’s clacking beak. I swear I can see the bird bloat a little just from the sheer volume streaming into it. It goes slack finally and the Leechman lets it go and turns and picks up its crystal and then just walks away into the forest. The glossy shine of the leeches disappears and then all I can see of it is a trail of mushrooms being pushed aside and snapped like candlesticks, and then it is gone entirely. The bird, meanwhile, has staggered to its feet and after a moment of what I can only describe as confusion, spread its wings and fluttered shakily into the air.

I look over at Erica and again feel a pang of sympathy for the woman. I don’t know where it comes from or what it’s doing inside of me but I feel it anyway, and I don’t want to. I heave out a huge sigh and nudge her; she looks up at me with a glum face. “Why don’t we just go?” I ask her. “I know it isn’t what you wanted but that thing is probably going to do a good job of keeping the crystal out of the Company’s hands as well.”

She nods after a moment. “I just don’t like thinking that Marcus died for nothing.”

I don’t have anything to comfort her with, so I stay silent. After a moment I can see resolution in her face. She gets up and stretches and then points. “It’ll be useless trying to do more today. Why don’t we see if that station over there is still liveable? We can stay there tonight and make a fresh start tomorrow.”

I stare at her for a moment, trying to register the combination of words in my brain, before I turn and follow her outstretched hand and see, off on the other side of the clearing, squatting evilly like a swollen tick, an overgrown and abandoned ranger station, clearly of an older model than the similar one up in Oyster’s Shame, but even so a mark of human habitation, a mark that someone somewhere was insane enough to build down here. That, I think, is what I found most disconcerting about the entire place – that lone ranger station, the one singular piece of evidence that someone had come _before…_

“Wait,” I mutter, as Erica fumbles with her pack. She glances up at me, starts to ask what the matter is, and then she sees what I’m looking at and quiets as well.

There is a flickering orange glow of firelight from one of the station’s shattered windows, and as we watch a shadow, man-sized and shaped, passes heavily along the far wall and then vanishes. Erica and I stare at each other as the significance of what we’ve just seen sinks in, and then she has drawn her revolver and is stomping off towards the station without even bothering to wait for me.

* * *

We enter the station as cautiously as we can, the muzzle of Erica’s revolver advancing ahead of her as she leans around corners, checks all the darkened spots. The station is a mess – it’s clearly been abandoned for a long time. Everywhere there are tiny stalks of growing mushrooms, and things have been living and shitting and dying in here for quite a while. The fire is just in the other room; I can hear it crackling. Erica and I glance at each other and then she nods and we burst around the corner. There’s someone there in an orange suit just like mine, his back to us, but after a moment, just from his frame, from the way he holds himself, I recognize him, and it’s like lightning has struck me.

“Oh my god,” I blurt. “Peter! You’re alright!”

Peter’s head lifts and he drops the can of food he had been holding to the floor. We must have startled him. “Peter!” I say again. I’ve almost reached him by now; I didn’t even realize I had gone to him, I hadn’t even thought about it. I am so relieved I could almost cry. Peter’s alive! Peter is –

Peter turns then and what is staring at me from behind his one remaining eye is nowhere close to being Peter. I can feel my gorge rise as I stare and I hear Erica jump, hear the high, throaty beginnings of a woman’s scream as she comprehends what we’re looking at.

The Leechman has gotten Peter. About half of his head is left, and it lolls at a sickly angle; his neck is broken, clearly. Sprouting from the right side of his body like a bouquet of flowers, tucked awkwardly into the shoulder of the suit, wriggling slowly over each other like a mess of eels, are leeches, thousands and thousands of them, tiny ones, large ones, ones like snakes, ones ribbed and venous and pale and dark. I can feel myself screaming as he reaches out for me, his eye dark, dull, glazed, the leeches sprouting from his neck wriggling in anticipation, and then he has bowled into me, knocked me over onto my back, and then he is on top of me trying to force his fingers into my mouth; they taste like dirt and mold and decay and I am going to vomit –

The revolver thunders one, two, three times, and I feel him shudder with the impacts, and though they knock him around a little he is clearly far beyond the point of being able to be put down by bullets. That hole in his neck yawns wider and leeches start to pour onto me and I scream, then snap my mouth shut, close my eyes. They press against me, bite at me, and I scrape desperately at my face, trying to clear it. Their teeth are sharp and they bite in and hang on for dear life. I am making horrible strangled screams through my gritted teeth because I know they want to get inside my mouth and do – and do whatever it is they do, and I realize that some unhinged part of me is trying to beg Peter to stop, trying to do anything to get him to stop –

I hear glass shattering from the left and a strange high-pitched shrieking sound, and something thuds into Peter very fast, and it is warm, insanely warm, very near to me. I still have my eyes shut, I can’t _see_. He is screeching, a long, drawn-out, hissing thing, and he gets to his feet, I can feel him get off of me. I sit up and claw the leeches away, crush them between my gore-slick fingers, toss their deflated bodies aside, and then I can finally see – Peter has gotten lit on fire somehow. He is staggering around the room, a bowlegged shuffling gate probably as near a sprint as he can get, slamming into the walls. He looks as though he’s headed for Erica and she, panicking, tosses the revolver at him – it bonks into his head and snaps it back, and he changes his course, and finally trips over the makeshift firepit he – it – had made in the center of the room. He collapses over the smouldering blaze, and then writhes until the movement and that horrible noise finally stops.

There is a crunch of broken glass off to the right and I look over and nearly give myself whiplash with the doubletake – Klaus, of all people, is clambering in through the window, taking care not to cut himself. He has a bright red flaregun in his hand and I realize what must have happened. “Oh, thank god,” I blurt, and Klaus’s eyes rest on mine for a moment, but he doesn’t smile, doesn’t say anything to reassure me. I start to frown, start to ask what the matter is, but Erica is stepping out, a wide smile on her face. “Klaus,” she says, “you got here right in the nick of time.”

Klaus crouches and picks up the revolver, examines it casually. “This is yours?” he asks, glancing up at Erica. “Hi Roan,” he adds, finally, but something about this is still odd, there’s something strange. I look over at Erica.

“Do you two… _know_ each other?”

Klaus laughs, but it’s rather mirthless. Erica offers me a hand and I take it shakily, let her haul me to my feet. She gives me a shaky grin. “I told you I had sources,” she says.

Erica reaches out for the revolver and Klaus holds it up. It looks as though he’s aiming it at her and for a moment I see a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, but it passes quickly, and she takes a step closer to him. “Klaus,” she starts, “give me the –“

He shoots her. I see the slug tear a chunk from her throat and she spins and flops to the floor. I scream, and some force of instinct made me hunker, my hands up to cover my face. I take them down, start to straighten, and then scream again as I see Klaus aim the revolver at me next. I cower there, waiting for it, before I hear the snap of a firing pin on a spent cartridge. I look up and see Klaus staring down at the revolver, a faint curl of disgust on his lips, before he tosses the gun aside. It clunks to the floor next to Erica and she shifts faintly, moaning. Her voice is thick and awful and terrified.

I get to my feet shakily. “It was you,” I say, staring at Klaus. It’s all coming together, it’s all starting to make sense. I can hear Erica choking quietly at my feet and I step around her, move closer to him. His eyes are dark and calm. The pit of my stomach is crawling and I recognize it as the same itchy feeling of anticipation that I used to feel back in Oklahoma whenever I stepped into the dojo for sparring day, two hours every Thursday. “It was you the whole time,” I tell him. “Wasn’t it? You lured her down here, fed her false information, made her think the crystal was something easily portable, told her that bullshit about a sphincter with an exposed nerve.”

Klaus spreads his hands modestly. I pull Marcus’s gun out, train it on him. His eyes flicker down, then back up again. He’s ice-cold, doesn’t even flinch. “You’re going to shoot me?” he asks.

“Erica said the FBI were in town, investigating Makado,” I tell him. “Are you with them?”

He nods after a moment. “She’s going down,” he tells me. “Hard. They finally got enough to nail her with. Letting people into the Pit, working with Peter,” he nods to the charred corpse over to the left. “Shit, I don’t know the full list of charges, I’ve been undercover here so long, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they could get the death penalty for her.”

I shake my head. “Fuck. Why did she send me down here, then? Why did she –“

“You’re an insurance policy,” he tells me, rolling his eyes like it’s obvious. “You’re somebody who’s got a strong sense of curiosity, a drive to figure out the truth. You hear what they’re going to slap her with, you’ll know it’s bull, you’ll try and get to the bottom of it. She figured we wouldn’t be able to get to you down here, but…” he grins. “She didn’t count on me.”

I swallow hard. “I’m a US citizen,” I remind him. “I’ve got rights.”

“You’re a statistic,” he corrects me gently. His hand whips out, slaps at the side of the gun, and goddam it, I flinch back instead of pulling the trigger. There is a clunk by my feet and I realize that he’s ejected the magazine.

I am, I notice, sweating. My eyes are very wide.

“You’re one of several hundred people who die every year trying to get in here,” he tells me. With exaggerated care, he takes the knife from his belt, holds it up to the light, knocks an invisible speck of dirt from its side. “Mostly indigents,” he says, taking a step towards me. I point the gun towards him, as though it’ll do anything. “Nobody anyone would take any notice of.”

“Stop,” I tell him.

“Or what?”

Then he lunges and I am fighting for my life.

Ali told us back at the dojo once that there are no winners in a knife fight. It is such an intimately dangerous kind of fight to have that it is nearly impossible to come away from one without being hurt one way or another – the difference will be whether you’re the one who ends up in the hospital or the one who ends up in the morgue.

But if you don’t have a knife…

I hold on to the gun, just because it’ll be more effective using it to batter him with than just my fists, but I’m fighting a losing battle. If you’re in a real fight, one where you need to murder the fuck out of someone with extreme prejudice before he succeeds in doing the same to him, blunt force trauma isn’t the way to go unless you can bring a lot of it to bear in a short period of time. But I have nothing, I haven’t got a brick to slam on his head, I haven’t got anything, I’ve just got a shitty little polymer-frame pistol that might give him a couple bruises if I smack him with its butt, while he has a wickedly sharp eight-inch bowie, and if he sticks that in me, one way or another it’s game over.

Erica has died at some point; some detached portion of my brain heard her last rattling gurgle before she fell silent and took note of it, but I couldn’t say when – time has elasticized itself, stretched like taffy. I can feel my heartbeat like drums in my head, deafening, and all I can see is Klaus, his wiry frame enormous, slashing at me as I back off further and further. He’s cautious, he knows that I could still do some damage to him if we end up grappling, but he knows he has a massive advantage as well. Sooner or later I won’t be able to back up any further and then he’ll have me.

So I don’t wait. On the downswing I lunge after him and seize his wrist. He punches me in the face with his other hand and I feel my nose snap beneath his knuckles as my head jerks back with the force of it, but I cling to his wrist doggedly and then bring my leg up with as much force as I can muster and knee him in the balls. The air shoots out of him and he staggers but he won’t let go of the damn knife, and I don’t want to drop the fucking gun just in case – well I don’t know just in case of what. But I don’t want to lose the one definite asset I might have, no matter how paltry. We struggle for a moment longer before he kicks my feet out from under me and I land hard on my back. I take a few gasping breaths and try to scramble away but Klaus straddles me, and then I shoot him.

The roar of the pistol is like thunder, even if it’s just a little shitty nine-millimeter, and I scream with the surprise of it, with the shock of it, and then I remember – Marcus kept a round in the chamber. I had only noticed after – after Euler, and then I had completely fucking forgotten. When I drew it on Klaus I had never racked the slide and he must have noticed and assumed there wasn’t one in the chamber. He must have assumed because of how I acted, how I acted like I couldn’t have just _shot_ him.

He’s choking on his own blood now, the knife forgotten. I shot him through the throat, just like he got Erica. He looks at me and tries to say something but just gurgles instead.

I leave him in there, leave all three of them in there, Erica and Peter and now Klaus, and sit down on the steps up to the ranger station. I leave the door open behind me in case I need to scramble back inside if a bird spots me. My nose is still throbbing like hell and there is a mess of blood all down my front. Not all of it, I suspect, is mine. I look down at my hands and watch them shake, and then I make fists, squeeze them as hard as I can, until my nails are digging into my palms.

And then, amid the mushrooms and the lizards and the birds, who knows how many miles deep, sitting at the bottom of the rabbit hole and staring at the tiny pinprick of light above, I can think of nothing sane to do but weep.


End file.
